Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 136: Cpaffy

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

“The image that the public gets is whatever they perceive it to be. Everybody has an opinion, everybody has their own vision, so I don't know what my public image is. I have no idea.” ― Lenny Kravitz https://www.youtube.com/@cpaffy

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend C. Paffy, who is a YouTube creator, dungeon master, and the self-declared once-in future king of southern New Hampshire. You can find him at YouTube.com, I believe, slash C. Paffy. Links in the description if I screwed that up. Right back to him in two seconds. If you would kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends. Also, 16. Currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent dreams and their meanings by Horace G.

Hutchinson lovingly, reproduced, recreated, and enhanced, if I may say so myself, by yours, truly, your friendly neighborhood, Dream Wizard. All this and more at Benjamin thedreamwizard.com. Also, if you'd head on over to Benjamin the Dreamwizard. Dot locals.com, trying to build a community there. Right now, it's me and one other guy, but you're welcome to jump in and tell me what you want that to be. I'd love to actually, you know, I don't, sorry, I guess to sit in there while I ramble about

myself, but of course, Ziphy, you're welcome to come to the locals. That Horace Hutchins guy is a real piece of work, you know. Throw in so much contemporary pop culture references in his work. You got to unscramble that nonsense. Don't buy the original. Buy the new one. Exactly. And it is actually a conversation with the general populace of the 1900s, 1901, I think, or 1919, 18.

I can't remember. It's in there. It's in the beginning of that. It is a guy who used to write, he's considered the father of modern golf. instruction. So he, uh, wrote a letter about dreams, fascinated, you know, like, like an article in a magazine and solicited readers to send him their stories. And then he wrote a book based on that. He went from writing books about sports, sporting instruction, golf, etc.

to do a book about dreams. Um, but before you forget, I want to say about the locals, uh, Benjamin the Dream Wizard dot locals.coms, I'd love that to be like, uh, one of my primary sources for dream interpretation interviews. If you're in the audience and you're, you know, a member that community and especially if you're doing any kind of sustaining donation i want to hear from you first want to give you top priority um you get your dreams interpreted before anyone else unless they're famous and i can clout chase which i'm not i'm not ashamed to ride anyone's coattails i'm doing that with getting i did that last week hopefully that brought me some subscribers right exactly you know that's actually probably a good uh place to start well okay number one see paffy you welcome

thank you for being here appreciate your time thank you for having me yeah and uh i didn't even mention the whole hat and the mug thing. I didn't know what to say. You're going to get the thumbnail and you're going to get me taking a sip with the hat on. Exactly. Because my thing is a teddy bear with a hat on, sipping a cup of coffee. And that'll be

the thumbnail. Branding. And it'll obscure my face a little bit because this is the first time my face will be on camera. Oh, very nice. Well, you're representing yourself very well. And you know, in the past what I've done some of my other thumbnails are people holding up their book. They wrote a book. They're not there.

You know, of course, they're doing shows, a podcast to promote their material. And why not? So on the very, very thumbnail itself, put the cover of their book so people can see, see what it is. Well, I didn't write a book, but Jordan Peterson did write a book, and it's not, it's not as good as I'm going to be honest. It's okay. It was his first effort, right? The Maps of Meaning. It's a little, it's a bit much, Jordan.

It's a little dense. It's a little repetitive. Yeah, there's just, you know, just. Speaking to him in general, and we're going to go all over the place. This is how this intro thing, there's no rules, basically. What we're seeing now, okay, so when he burst onto the scene, he'd had some 30 years of teaching and whatnot or longer to think of all these things critically, to distill these ideas into maybe easier to understand or very, very, very formulated expressions. And so he had in him, I think, you know, maps of meaning. which he struggled with a bit.

That's, that's, I'm going to relate it to this as soon as I get my head straight on it. But what we saw with 12 rules for life and then the antidote to, the other one about chaos, which I can never remember the title of the second book, those were kind of collections. Beyond order.

Beyond order. Yes, yes. And I'm, you know, okay, I'm tangential. I'm all over the place.

I try to keep one foot on both sides of the yin yang line, left right on the political divide. Um, chaos and order is how, how I actually conceptualize those two. broad political trends. Long story short, what we're seeing now in people's criticism of Peterson is he says a lot of stupid things. And I'm like, that's what he did for the entire 30 years before he formulated everything into the ability to write two books and maps of meaning.

What we're watching now is live, real-time evolution of his, of him considering new ideas, trying to formulate the next step in some, you know, evolution of his thought process. I think that was everything I was going to say. So people think he sounds stupid, but he's being, he's embodying the fool. And hopefully someday. He thinks out loud. It's not foolish. But if your bad faith, you assume him thinking out loud is his set idea he's trying to persuade you.

And you're like, that's stupid. Exactly. But he knows it's stupid. He's throwing something up. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I mean, we get this. And it's very interesting. You said that, too.

because people kind of maybe tend to confuse the idea of the fool with being foolish. And it is. That's actually where we get the thing from. But the process, the necessity of the process, embodying that person willing to be wrong and experience wrongness to get to the right answer, that's not necessarily being foolish. It is, but it's a good thing. It's like the connotation of being a fool.

You know, we think of foolish as, ah, stupid, you should have known better. Maybe so, but also stupid don't know better because I'm learning. And it's a process you have to go through. Like a school child getting to their degree is a fool who then eventually becomes the savior, the one who, to quote Peterson, the one who now has the ability to do the saving because they've passed through the foolishness into, into the, that ability through that process. It's like a process you can't avoid.

So it's almost like when you call someone, say someone's being foolish when it's necessary. It's like, how dare you be ignorant of anything ever? Well, we're only human. There's a whole, all kinds of shit I have no idea about it. You've got to be comfortable.

We've got to embrace becoming the fool. As the martial artist say, you know, empty your mind, become the empty cup. And then it can be filled. That's the, that's the fool. Yeah, well, you know what? Because when you think,

Like the class clown in high school versus the class clown in elementary school. Those are different people, you know? Because you don't know who the sociopaths are in elementary school. Because they don't know what's going on. So all the boys are getting a little rowdy. But the one who crosses the line, bam, they throw him in another school because he crossed the line. But in high school, you're almost an adult. And let me tell you, you know the line and the class clown, well, he's a comedian.

And, you know, that's done an easy job. And he goes right up to it and he knows when to stop and he doesn't get thrown out. It's amazing. That is the process of mastery. Absolutely. You know what you find that line and ride it to best effect. You go over it and cause yourself more trouble than it's worth or you stay too far under it. You're not pushing the boundary.

You're not being edgy enough. That's absolutely correct. That's good stuff. But we should probably, okay, that's me rambling and there's another wrong with that. But we should probably focus on what you do as a YouTube creator. So you host Dungeons and Dragons games? Yes, I host. Well, first of all, if people are watching me,

it's probably because they saw me on Kitty's thinker stream. And I do the Jordan Peterson voice. That's how I made a name for myself, was doing Jordan Peterson impression. Yeah, people love it. I dig it. So I'm the intact. I'm the bad guy at that stream.

I get to play the bad guy a lot. Although I don't, I view myself as the misunderstood hero. Of course. But other, yeah, naturally. Yeah, but I get to play, I get to be sort of the antagonist a lot. But, but yeah, what I do on my channel is I host Dungeons Dragons games. I'm not great as a dungeon master. I'm basically pretty new.

I've been doing it for like a year, which seems like a lot, but I'm not like working. I'm just throwing shit together and seeing what sticks. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's a lot of, it's a lot of, it's writing. It's writing, but you're not writing a story. You're writing things that are going to, like, happen around a story. It's like painting a background. Yeah. I would say it is kind of like writing, but it's almost writing one of those choose your own adventure books.

And if you remember those, like those were big when I was a kid, a whole series of young adult, choose your own adventure books. You know, if you choose to get in the car with the mysterious man, turn to page 24. If you choose to run away

into the dark, turn to page 39, that kind of thing. I'm sort of against that form of dungeon mastering, actually, which is the, because I view that,

that's like an advanced form of railroading, like, here are your set path. It's on rails, yeah. Yeah, I sort of, I prefer, go, go ahead. Here's what's happening.

Like the first 10 sessions, there was a war with pirates going on. And in my mind, I was like, oh, the players are going to be so into this. The pirates are coming. The communists are revolting. And the players were like, nah, we want to make drugs.

Okay. I mean, one of my players in my main campaign is a very successful drug dealer now. And I wouldn't have thought that would happen. But yeah, I just earlier today, actually, like an hour ago, I started a new campaign with that darn kitty, Andrew Clark, some other people that have been around on her stream. Nice.

I hope you didn't end that adventure too soon to come and meet with me today. That was all you have no, no. I aim for two hours. Okay. We actually could have started earlier. But yeah. So this was well within the limits of what I had. Yeah.

Fair enough. Good deal. Just checking in there. You know, it's in my, I'm very, I don't know if I express this on shows ever, but I'm typically available Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific time because I game stream at 5 p.m. every day, except Thursday's new episode of dreamscapes such as this one. If anyone's watching, that's five premieres, live premieres, uh, 5 p.m. on Thursdays. So that's why I set that time frame. I was like, I got, I can't get up too early. I just can't.

It kills me to do that all the time. And I can't record too late. I got to be done in time for the game stream. So scheduling. That was fascinating, I'm sure. But I think, so when you said the idea of, you know, railroading or putting things on rails. Yeah. And I've been guilty of this a lot.

Like, because eventually you get so sick of your player shit. You're just like, go do the thing. Like, stuff happening. And if your players, if a couple of your players are too chaotic for like the other players, you have to railroad the chaotic players. you have to you have to railroad the chaotic players a little bit. Yeah, I got to bring them to the line and say, let's roll some dice and then kind of, you know, blue lightning and you're, okay, now you're on the right path again.

Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say that in some ways, I, that might be a more novice dungeon masters way that, you know, handicap, speaking of golf from earlier, with the idea of, you know, I don't, for me personally, is I would say I don't have the ability to roll with it enough to be to be spontaneously imaginative. I can be chaotically imaginative and associated with it in the dream thing. And it's translating that to other other skills is different. But the idea of of having a world in my head and kind of rolling with, then that led me

to the other, the other I thought I had, which is ideally the dungeon master should be as entertained by the process as the players. And not just the entertainment of telling a story that you. make other, force other people to live out, like on rails. But you get surprised by what they're saying. They are telling you the next part of the story. It's like writing a, writing the story together. And you've got all these collaborators, and they're each kind of embodying a character.

And then they tell you who that character is and what they want and what they, how they choose to interact with the world. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that. That's, that was my thought. Well, yeah, that's exactly right. You said, you said you don't have the ability to be spontaneous. creatively creative like that. Not in the moment.

What I'm terrible. What I mostly do is I write the world. I write what's happening. There are conflicts happening that my players, for 30 sessions, so that's a year, haven't even learned about yet. They've never been brought up.

And it's happening in the world. So if the hardest part, honestly, is names. I don't want to name people if they never come up. So if a player's like, what's your name? I'm like, God damn it. Like, names have to happen, but that's like, you know,

He's Mr. Inkeeper. He's Mr. Inkeeper. Yes. He's Mr. Kinieper. Right. Mr. Underhill. So at first, I solved this problem. I had a stack of books by me at all times,

and I would pull something from the title of the book. But eventually I ran out of things to pull from titles. Right. So it's like you have to, like, I mean, it's so hard to think of names in the moment. You don't want all your characters to be named Dave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how many people might have, but, okay, speaking of spontaneous, this is something

that I couldn't predict it would come to me, but now that I, now that it did, I want to mention it, there are actually, you just type in, um, uh, random fantasy name generator and there'll be like a dozen websites that'll give you random fantasy generated names. I don't know if anyone's ever thought of that in terms of using it for like, what's this guy's name? You just go, bloop. Uh, Gregori Ipswich. Done.

That's his name. It's great, but also it's almost a little. disheartening to your players for them to go, what's this guy's name? And you go, click, oh, it's, it's goose-star,

long- prepared, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, but it's also, the players enjoy catching me off guard with names. They're like, I want to ask this person,

like, where the inn is. And I go right down there, and he goes, okay, what's your name, first and last for you. Right?

He becomes a bit of a running gag. Ah, you bastard. Yeah, right. It's fun. It's fun. And my new party hasn't learned about it yet, but they will start, shortly and they'll ask everybody what their names.

Now, what you could do is... I tried to have a list of extra names to pull from, like, in case of character. But honestly, it's so... I don't know. Like, because the names need to match the character. Like, like... Like, they can either be funny, ironic, like, a big giant whose name is Bob. Or they have to be, like, really fitting.

Yeah, right? But if they're just sort of, like, blah, like, I don't understand why this... this character has this name. Like, NPCs can be named Henry, no problem. But main characters need that, like important,

important characters in the story need to have important. Yeah, or like you said, ironic names, and that's pretty funny, you know, it's like,

ironic names are fun. His name is a beggar, but is his, his, he describes himself as, you know, uh, Henryton Wadsworth,

uh, butterscrap, uh, the, the third or something, you know, that's, I love that kind of irony.

Yeah. um oh it's going somewhere in my head complete brain fart um it's been years since i played dungeons and dragons i think computer gaming took over that for me um and i would what i would rather do is actually so so i love the that's why mimos i had a bit of an mMO i'd say maybe even addiction back i played ever quest from 99 to 2004-ish five years i played a dwarven dwarven cleric of the hammer of brel that was our that was our clan that was fun um But I used to, so when I was real young, I had a D&D group and we would play Saturdays. And you get there by like 10, 11 a.m.

We would stay till, you know, sundown in the summer. And that kind of stuff is playing all day, taking breaks. But none of us wanted to stop. And we didn't have a better time to do it. We weren't doing it two hours a day or multiple times a week. It was, this is our weekend. This is what we get to do. But I think that for me transitioned into I would rather stay home and have pretty things to look at and play an MMO.

Oh, collaboratively. I still don't like PVP. I prefer, let's get together and test our skill at group, group function to, you know, can we, can we overcome this raid? I loved raids. Those were, those were amazing. Even if I had terrible lag and I had to almost point my face into the wall just and just read the text, because all the sparkles of too many people on the screen. I had a terrible computer back then.

Anyway, I don't know if, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, the idea of MMOs versus in person. I will we play online so that that's that's a big and I wouldn't play dungeon dragons if everything was manual no like that's such a huge barrier entry that I don't want to do yeah like like like you have to be committed to do that we have to be in the neighborhood with the people you know I mean you're not going to fly out on a weekend to go to another state to attend a d and d game now maybe you could if you had the reason well you might have you you might have you're a famous voice actor on critical role but like we're not you right yeah yeah Yeah. That is that is an unfortunate kind of barrier to entry in some ways, which has been resolved by the internet. It's like now you can have a friend who lives in Dubai and you can have a friend who lives in, you know, Portland, Oregon and you can all meet together online at the midline of New Hampshire or whatever and have that midline of Dubai and Portland. Exactly. Exactly. That's the new, the Chamber of Commerce can have that one. That's on me. Yeah. And I like that. I've always liked that. And also I'm on the kind of ASP side of thing.

So I'm like, I don't actually want to be around people in person. I like talking to people. But on my own terms, in my own time, at a distance, you know, for a reason.

But otherwise, like being in the same room with people is kind of awkward. It's less awkward when it's online. I'm a lot more freewheeling and let my, um, you know, let my thoughts roll wherever they do. So yeah.

Didn't really have a question. It's, it's, it's interesting online because I, I, I don't know if in person people have, you feel more of an obligation to role play. But sometimes online, you have to poke your players a little bit to get them to be like, listen, you're, you're doing a thing here. Speak in character. Yeah. I also, I totally plan to do a Japanese accent for the bad guy early this morning. And I came up to it. I was like, I'm not going to do this racist.

Japanese accent for this entire session. Now, I studied Aikido for five years. So I can very much do Japanese accent. Because that is a direct interpretation or my version of my instructor. He's,

I'll be able to focus this way. Isn't it so crazy how it's, it's, it's so easy to do an accent, like, to mimic a person. But if you, like, were asked to do that specific regional accent, it's like so much harder. Yeah, and I'm only doing one slice. Like, if you look at it, like, Even if you watch anime and you hear with the way some people talk,

and now I'm starting to pick up on it, there's a whole range of different accents in Japan. It's a tiny island. It's long, it's big. It's bigger than California or something like that, I think. Besides, it's as long as the East Coast. Yeah. From Maine to Florida.

That's how long. Exactly. And you get that much. And we look at, you know, Americans know, there are so many different accents in, just on the East Coast going from New Hampshire to Florida. Tons of different accents. And then all across the Midwest.

And then you get California, you get regional accents, like surfer, you know, California, surfer dude being a type of accent. And that's, Japan's got the same thing, too. So that one imitation I did of an old instructor, that's just one specific guy from a specific area. And maybe he doesn't even talk like exactly like the other people in his area. And there's a dozen more, you know, you know, city accents, regional accents, country accents, Okinawa versus Tokyo, you know, that kind of thing.

Anyway, so that's, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and drop the not all. Not all Japanese people sound like my own. Not all Japanese people sound like that. Right. But some of them do. Therefore, it is not racist. Yeah, or it is and I don't give a fun. It is interesting, like, knowing the syllable structure of Japanese is almost makes it easier.

Like, it's the easiest syllable structure in the world. It's continent and vowel, constant valve, kind of bowel. Yeah. It's, and in English, we have words like strength, which we have to pronounce in Dungeons the Dragons all the time. And it's, it's, it's cotton, kind of, cotton, cotton, cotton, cotton, cotton, one syllable. I was looking at the word thorough earlier. And it just broke my brain. Two syllables.

It did. Yeah, yeah. And it did, you know, as opposed to through, which is very close. One oh, the difference. Thorough or through. And then there's through to go through the door. And there is through. I threw the dagger.

English is weird. Which is a much better spelling. Much better spelling. When I print my, I'm thinking about printing an English dictionary that gets rid of all the O-U-G-H words. And then there's an O-U-G-H. I'm going to respell. And that's funny because sometimes it's an U-S sound through.

And sometimes it's an F sound like trough or draft. O, do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name? Ah, thought, it's an a. O-U-G-H is a-A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that,

like if you don't know how to spell something you might as well just put an o uge and be like that's the sound of that thing next yeah that reminds me of two things number one mark twain i think it was way back in the day proposed changes to the english language that simplified it and each one he implemented he gave examples of how it how it would work and then by the time you got down and then he started writing in that style this was all part of it like he would change his own his own spelling of words as he's going through this kind of um satirical essay and by the bottom of it you can't understand a single thing he's saying because he's replaced all the letters according to his rules and it's not even it's not even english anymore it's something else so it's that's very just very interesting well well but here's like if mark twain is let you can get rid of something you can you can keep all the you can keep all the words but you can get rid of some words that aren't spelled uh intuitively at all or like counterintuitive like oh u g h how do you a hug a hug uh right what o you like that like but you can keep like T-H, there's a lot of things you can keep,

but, I mean, you can get rid of, like, the bizarre ones. Like, I-N-G actually makes sense. Like, strings of letters, some of them actually make sense. If you, like, pronounce it slowly and then pronounce it quicker and quicker, it ends up making that sound anyway. Yeah. Definitely, I just had a little tangent in my brain. I'm just angry at O-U-G-H.

That's the one thing I'm angry at. It makes no sense. It's, oh, well, I was going to tell you the second part. So it was Mark Twain was one of them, and then the other one. Shit. I think I lost it. Oh, it was Gallagher. I love that, you know, watermelon smashing Gallagher guy back in the late 70s, early 80s was kind of the peak of his career and he's kind of trailed off since then.

But, you know, still, I think, hilarious guy. He had a whole bit about, um, different words and different pronunciations of like, um, T-O-M-B, tomb, tomb, tomb, coom. C-O-M-B, coom? No, comb, okay. C-O-M-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-m? No. bomb. What the hell is going on here?

Bom's the one that makes sense, though. Bomb. Out of all those examples, yeah, yeah. Um, that's the one that, um, right? That's the one that makes total sense. Absolutely. But you can change the other two. The other two.

Com could be C-O-M-E and come could be, oh, no, right, yeah, yeah. You don't have to switch some things around. Maybe we start adding the, like the Germans do the umlaut to make it kind of fading into an R-ish sound, like the R sound, or whatever they do it. Have you ever seen a universal continent like table? Because there's only so many ways humans can place their tongues and their breath and their lip. You can organize the sounds and like what languages have what? And it's bizarre, like French doesn't have one.

of like the super, I forget what it is, it like age or something. Like, there's, there's a continent that we have that French just doesn't have. And that's one of the, and there's, there's a, but like, the amount of sounds like are, like, rollatives, like, okay, it's er, but it's also and it's also, it's all, it's all, but that's all just where you place your tongue. Has anyone said you look like Jack Black? Is that, is that the famous guy you get most often? I, I don't get any famous people.

Well, I'm telling you, Jack Black, because I just got, I just got a vision of Nacho Libre. Yeah, I don't, I feel like I should get famous people. I get, I get fat guys with glasses on the street. And someone's like, that guy looks like you. I'm like, not really, though. Yeah, that's not as much of a compliment. I mean, if I'm going to tell someone they look like a celebrity, now it may be like a, if I'm just being honest and not. I guess I do get one celebrity all the time.

What's that? I get, I get, I get, I get Idriselba a lot. People are like, you know, you remind me of, oh, it's Idriselva. I can see that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Especially in the hair. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Right. That's it. And certainly the style of stress. Exactly. We spent a lot of time talking about words. It's all about D&D and names and pronunciations and whatnot. I don't know what to go from there.

I had other things in my head. They're just gone. I have a question for you. about dreams. Please, anything, yeah. I, I, I had a weird dream, not the one that I think we're going to analyze, but it was just like, three nights in a row after the most recent thinkers, I was like, I had that, like, what's the, cotton mic, cha?

What is that, is that it, chaw? Um, I'm not sure. You have stuck in your, stuck in your craw, craw, craw, stuck in your craw, yes, yes, got you. Something, ah, speaking of words. And I had like dreams. It was a very weird dream. It was about me, like, losing my senses while being in a corner and trying to call for help, but I can't.

Like, yeah. And I was like, I was very upset about this thing in The Thinkers. I was like, I feel like we're talking past each other a lot. And I was like, I felt upset about that because I felt ironically enough like I got Kathy Newman. I got Kathy Newman. I sort of like, and I rewatched it. And I actually, I was like, that's not what I said. but like immediately after someone was like, oh, you said this.

I was like, well, I didn't say that. Yeah. So just, I was. And yeah. No, I think that perfectly relates to exactly that experience. And so what I, what I do with this where my brain was, sorry, I, I, I, shorthand things if I can, but I try to shorthand it in, uh, people's own language, if I can't.

So losing your senses, stuck in a corner, can't talk. Those are kind of three broad strokes that you brought up and I, and I made sure to write them down. Then you gave a little bit. And this is something we do as, as, as. the dream interpretation process. What was going on recently in your life? Well, these dreams happened after this particular episode.

And the way I felt about that episode was I was not heard, couldn't, couldn't speak, relates to the dream. And I was being, because I was not being heard or the social circle in, in essence, rejected me. I'm in a corner as if punished, as if separated from the group. And, you know, not that they didn't invite you back, not that people don't like you, but in that moment, in that context, you had a strong feeling of disconnection. Right. And losing your senses, you're asking, in my estimation, you tell me if this sounds right,

you're asking yourself, am I the problem? Did I screw this up? Am I perceiving things wrong? Have I lost the ability to accurately sense myself? the way I presented it. Was I the one in the wrong in that scenario? And so you're having these dreams to sort that out in your own mind. What do I think actually happen?

How do I feel about that? And maybe even what can I do about it? Because that's usually the reason we review these things in our mind is like, I don't want to, I want to avoid that negative experience or I want to repeat that positive experience. How do I do that? What was it? How did it work?

Can I repeat it? Et cetera. So that would be. be my brief analysis of those set of dreams. And you said you had them multiple nights in a row. Yeah, I've had them for the past few days. Like, like, and it was like,

that was like bizarre. Well, because I got, I got angry about it. I was like, the night I was like angry. And then I was like, I've re-listened to it. And I was, I listened to it. And I was like being upset about like, I was, I was definitively in the right, by the way. All right.

Like, like that entire episode, I was, I was on point. Everyone else was the problem. Right. But like I was like, okay. And then recently, whatever, I was like, okay, it's, it happened. There was a lot of people. It was a 10 person panel and everyone was like angry about the videos we were watching. It's not, it's like water under the bridge.

Like, who cares? Sure. Like, not an environment for constructive thoughts. Yeah. And no one has made it clear to you. You are uninvited. I mean, you're still part of the social circle. And nobody hates you long term.

I do, I do remember listening to one. I can't remember when it was where there was a comment. directed towards the idea of, of, um, you're talking too much. Uh, and that's, that's always tough for, for me,

especially where like, I can ramble. I absolutely can. I know I do. But I also want to contribute because I'm there. And sometimes I want to, I think I have funny things to say and maybe they're not. And, and, and,

and I, and I, it's hard. That might have been, that was either me saying that or it was directed towards me. Yeah. And I can't remember which one. One of the two.

You might have brought it up yourself like, gosh. And sometimes we realize that. We're like, I'm talking too much. That's what I... I tell people to shut up all the time. I'm like, okay, shut up.

I'm talking now. I catch myself doing that in interviews, and I'm like, I'm supposed to be asking you questions. This is not... Everybody hears me ramble every week. More interested what you have to say, so I got to stop myself.

But so that could be related to it as well. And what I was going to ask was, have the dream stopped? Or you had it again last night? Or it's not every night. No, no. I had a totally different dream last night, actually. but equally

like bizarre very strange do you want to like before we get to the one we're actually going to analyze you want to keep going um well yeah I just had a few more questions about this one is you have now come to formulate a

more solid understanding you've resolved that in your mind you would say you know the the theme of those dreams of am i am is my perception off am I being shoved in a corner actually or was it a one time thing where it felt like that? And then, um, you know, the inability to talk. This is my theory on recurring dreams is that once we've analyzed it enough to understand it, it doesn't need to recur.

It will continue to recur. Uh, number one, if we haven't figured it out or number two, if another situation like that happens again, you may, you know, speak, you know, the class clown crossing the line type of thing. You're trying to be the class clown. Maybe it crosses the line in, not in any objective sense, but for that moment of time with that social group, whatever the reason, it's not appreciated the way you wish it was. This type of dream may come back because now it's in some ways been crystallized in your mind

is something that's a personally iconic representation of a type of feeling. There wasn't a question in there, but I don't know if you think, have any thoughts about that. No, that's, I mean, that's basically spot on. Like, I mean, it was an interesting dream, but I didn't need it to be analyzed because, like, I knew what I was working out. Like, the dream was like spot, like, one for one. It was so bizarre. Like, I've never woken up and being like, oh, my God, that was like a one for one representation of what I was feeling that day. But that was like a very strange situation.

Oh, yeah. And that also gets around to the idea we were talking, you know, before we record. And for folks out there, we always talk before we record, never record. without permission, that kind of thing. So everything's on the up and up. We were talking before. I just went on a tangent about what dream you should share. And I'm like, okay, I work with whatever people bring to me.

It could have been that series of dreams. We could have spent a lot more time thinking about it and talking about it. But it's also sometimes those dreams are self-evident or you solve the problem yourself. And it's not worth asking me because we've only got this one shot in a way to do this. So we don't want to waste it on something you've already figured out. although I have done that as well, just as another tangent, this is how my brain explodes

and all these different ideas. I have had previous guests where they bring me a dream as a mystery and they don't tell me anything about it except the dream. And then they let me kind of run with it and see if I can get anything close to what they came up with themselves.

And usually I would, you know, to do my own horn a little bit, I'd say I've generally been able to get pretty close in terms of, and they have to help a little bit too. Like they can't just be stoic and say, I'm not telling you. It's like, well, if I'm right, let me know. Then we can build on that without revealing too much.

It's a delicate, delicate balance. But so, okay, long story short, I get a lot of people who would say, you know, that's almost exactly what I came up with. And you saw a few new angles that I hadn't considered that I think are relevant. I'm like, yay me. You know, that's like, I get a tremendous satisfaction out of solving the puzzle. And that win-win of the intersection, say, of, I get my, my satisfaction and my content and they get a meaningful understanding that hopefully can be useful

and settle a mystery for them like this is bugging me. We looped back around like which dream should you share? And I always tell people it's dreams self appear to self-select for importance. So whatever feels the most meaningful to you is probably the one we should do. And also the one that is the most puzzling because usually there's something there that like if you could figure it out, it might be useful. and you may not be able to figure it out without some feedback process of discussion. And I'm always happy to have people bring that to me, of course.

But you can also do this kind of with your friends and family. They might not be as good at it. But they can kind of, if they're interested in understanding and helping you sort it out, you can just kind of have a discussion about that. Just talk it through with somebody. And you can get a lot of benefit out of that, too. That's my rant. So I don't know which dream you wanted to do, the one last night or the one,

that was the most puzzling. I think we kind of settled on that. I think I have a hard time being the one that's making choices. You can flip. One last night was, it was a very strange dream and I have a lot of details about it.

But I don't think it's quite as like shocking as the one before. The other one seems to be a better story in some ways. Like a better, yeah, it has like, it has like a more cohesive narrative. The one I had last night was very,

uh, bizarre. like things just kind of happen, you know, one of those kinds of dreams, but in the same setting. It was like a very unnerving experience, but it wasn't. And that's that's another element of the self-selection process is like if the more disturbing the dream in some ways, the more useful it might be to sort it out. It's like, what was I, what did I experience that caused me to feel that way?

And how does that relate to my life? What am I concerned about? dreams are very often, it's an interesting category of dreams, say prophetic dreams or dreams conceptualized as sent by God as a warning to you. Now, that is very metaphysical, that is very spiritual, that is very spooky woo. A lot of people dismiss it, especially if you're an atheist. Now, I am, I'm an agnostic atheist, but I appreciate that. And there's actually a way that that is kind of true. If we think of our subconscious in a way as a higher power, it is a able to perceive and accumulate more information than our waking attention can,

can attend to or process. If we go to sleep and our subconscious releases some kind of effervescence that comes up into our consciousness and directs our attention towards something that feels emotionally impactful, that is in a way a higher power. Call it God, if you want, sending you messages to direct your attention to things in your life that might be of benefit if you could understand them. It could make your life better, easier, allow you to accomplish something that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do without this message from God. So I love the metaphorical ways of understanding that, you know, and this is, you know, I've denied, and I did it in this stream too, that I hear the voice of God or talk to God or

spirits or angels or anything. Then again, that is a metaphorical way of describing exactly what I do. Where does my random association come from that I suggest to you that you, that you say, yeah, that sounds right. Hell if I know, you can call it the Greek muses. You can call it God. If it is God, that's fantastic. Make me useful. I'm a vessel for your Holy Spirit. I don't know that, you know, I don't want to get a big head about that. And I don't technically believe it being an atheist. But that is what the experience is like. Where do my ideas come from? Hell if I know. Why did I say that? Why did that occur to me? Why was it useful to you? That's a damn miracle. So I'm willing to say, If someone believes I talk to God, sure.

That's fine, you know. But I'm not going to claim that myself. That's, I got to be humble. Anyway, that's my rant on that. I'm doing it again. I guess I'm talking too much. I think we'll probably get more out of the fetus jar dream. I think that's the one that probably has more filler.

That one, you know, that one piqued my interest. I'm like, oh, that's cool. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you have more anything you want to shill or other topics on your mind. And we've got to get an open platform or we can just jump into the dream thing.

It doesn't have to. Let's jump into it. You can put your little plug, your little commercial for your books right here. Right. That's exactly what I do. As I say, I'm going to make a note of the time.

What are we got it? And then, yeah. 13 works at historical dream literature. Yeah, yeah. Soon to be 17. I'm working on. Oh, 16. I'm not working on.

I need to get back to working on. I got to edit the audio and put it all together. I've been hopefully this week. This week, I've actually gotten ahead on video editing and other things I needed to get done. So I'm going to try and make a promise to myself to put more, put more effort into that. But it's long past due.

I just shut up and listen. So our friend, uh, C. Paffy is going to tell us his dream. We're going to see what we can make of it. I'm ready when you are. Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscape. program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions.

New Dreamscape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature, available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the dreamwizard. dot com.

All right. So, I'm on the couch watching TV is how my dream starts. And I'm watching some sort of late night show, like, you know, the late night show format with the table and the couch. And on the late night show is like me.

Like a clone of me that I'm watching on the late night show. And he's there and he's doing some sort of showing, showcasing his support for abortion rights. So how he decides to do this is he wheels out 10 jars of fetal development, like jars of fetal development, but like living.

So like, I've seen jars of fetal development that are not that, but this was like, like, they're pink. They're not like pale. They're like, they're alive almost. And so he takes a sledgehammer, and he smashes the first jar, which is basically just a fertilized egg. And he starts working,

his way up. And as he gets closer, the last jar is a nine-month. So that's like a pop-or-outer. That's like birth time. So I'm like, oh, my God, he's going to smash that jar. I need to get down there. And I rush, and I rush to the studio. And when I show up, he gets the last jar, and he smashes it. And he smashes it, and there's, like, viscera that goes everywhere. And as soon as, like, the explosion of viscera happens, I'm... I'm him, then. And then I'm him as soon as the end. And I'm covered in the thing. And everyone is cheering, except not with, um, I, we haven't brought this up.

Um, I don't, there's, there's noticeably never any audio in my dreams. It always freaks me out. Something like every night, I'm like, I can't, I, like, I'm going deaf every night, but people are like making cheering faces. And that's where the dream is with me covered in visceral, holding a sledgehammer, people cheering me on. Okay. All right. That's great. I'm making another note here. I've gotten smart lately and I started instead of having to scrub through the video like,

where did that begin? Like I just write down the times like timestamps. Where did that? Yeah. Perfect. So we got that. That's a fantastic dream. And I've already got some ideas about it. And but what I'm going to do is try not to let those run away, run away with me. And so the step one, shut up and listen. Step two, deep dive. We go back through that narrative again and try and help we see it a little bit better through your eyes and see what we can pull out of it. So you're at home on the couch watching TV. This was your in real life house?

It's like a vague house. It's vaguely a house. Like almost like, you know, like the Simpsons living room, just like couch TV door. It didn't resemble my house very much. Okay. That's an interesting thing too. So right off the bat, we've got

I mean, you weren't on an airplane. You weren't in school. You were at home, but not your home. So you were in a home. So we started looking at things from that perspective. And it was a very vague home. And it brought to mine the associate, it was kind of like the Simpsons,

where you're watching a fictional representation of a home in a way or a, what's another way to say that? Let me write this down all quick. You can jump in any time if anything comes to mind. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, like all the animated sitcoms have the same home set up. It's couch in the middle, TV in front, door to the side. There's room behind the door, and there's usually stairs, like, by there.

And I don't live in a two-story house. So there's no stairs, but there were stairs there. So it's a very vague. This is like what, if I think of a house, like, think of a single family house. This would probably be what I thought of. Just like, it's house shifts. House-ish. Yeah, yeah.

And this is where Symbols get real personal, too. So in this context for you specifically with this issue, whatever you're describing, what comes to my mind is inhabiting a generic opinion in a way. If it was your home, you know, you are at home. It is your space. That's a closer to a personal thing. Looking at a generic home is like it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an issue that would be related to home in a sense,

but it's not my home. It's like inhabiting a generic space. I already said that once before, but like, it's almost like generic public opinion is the idea that came to mind of like considering what most people would think. So a generic representation of the house as if on television. And then it's related to you're watching TV. So there's actually kind of layers of self-remove and consideration of how other people would view something, even putting yourself in the position of an external person viewing yourself.

You are yourself, but you're watching yourself. You're watching a version of yourself, which could exist or you think might exist. there is in in my mind an idea of weighing your own opinion what do I believe am I me or am I that version of me

I don't know if this is resonating at all I don't think we've gotten to the point of like it's not it's not not resonating I just I'm not seeing the connection yet sure no no go with your gut and a lot of times I just ramble And then sometimes what we get to eventually affirms what I originally said.

Sometimes it disproves it. And that's that's perfectly fine. So I think we might have dwelled on the physical environment enough. Do you have any strong visual representation of the TV? What kind of TV is a modern flat screen or kind of an older model? It's like maybe year 2000. And it's not flat. It's definitely a box,

but it's not like a, doesn't have dials. It has funnels. Gotcha. So, but it is more of the older style cathode ray tube. It's the glass screen with the. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's smaller. It's way smaller than like any TV that most people would buy now. It's a, it's a TV on a stand, not on the wall. This also relates to,

I mean, what I'm getting, uh, my, my intuitive, uh, associations are, this is

it's an older TV it's a TV from another time you are maybe viewing this through the filter of of what people in the past might have thought if they were seeing it

it reminds me of the TV we had when I was a kid it's not like from before my time but we we had older stuff than like the most modern stuff on it but it wasn't that long ago fair enough yeah yeah it just wasn't

a, um, it wasn't a, 2023 model of a television. It wasn't a flat screen high res, you know, mounted on the wall type of thing. So you're definitely, there's definitely a, um, let's say, viewing whatever you're considering through the lens of how it might have been perceived in the past or what you consider to be an older perspective on something.

If that makes sense, you know, you're seeing it as if you were someone from another time, what they would see when they looked at this particular type of thing. I don't know if that's making any kind of sense loosely? It more, maybe, but it more just so feels like, again, like when I think of a TV, I think of like the first TV we had, not like when I was born, not like, like in the same sense of,

I don't think of my house. I was thinking of a very generic house. It was a very generic TV. Okay. There's another perspective there. And I think you've corrected me twice or kind of pulled me, in a direction twice, which I think is good. You're saying, no, it feels more like a TV when I was a kid.

So there may be some element of viewing this as whatever the dream was about, whatever this concept is, we're considering. There's an experience of the world as a kid. There's a not knowing. There's an uncertainty. There's a, you know, the inexperience of youth in a way. So it may be a signal or suggestion of your own uncertainty about what. whatever this issue is, is like, imagine you're seeing this through the lens of what it would

have been like as a kid, not understanding something and being confused by it or seeking to understand it better. I don't know if that resonates more. Yeah. Yeah, that resonates more than the other thing. Gotcha. That's definitely. Fair enough. Fair enough. And that's good. So we're kind of, and we actually talked about that a little before, like the empty cup, eyes of a child type of thing. It's like, let me take a good, hard-looking. at this as if I don't know anything.

Let's start from the beginning. So I'm going to put myself viewing this. And all of that from, you know, could have very well glossed that over and said, okay, how's TV? Let's move on. No, what kind of TV? Why? You know, that's, I think that is kind of important.

And so it had like buttons, maybe even up, do you remember you operating a remote at all or, or you're just, the show's on, you're watching that show? Yeah, I'm, I've, I've never had a remote. You don't be ridiculous. You can move and press the buttons. Right. As Ellen Jenner said, we had three channels and no remote. You had to hate a show enough to get up and walk you across the room and change that dial.

I remember those chum, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. That was crazy days. I remember the, oh, yeah, see, I'm older than you by a bit, perhaps. The days of the old CRT, right? You just may have a tremendously youthful appearance. The old days of taking these little prongs and you would have to attach them from the Atari, $2,600, attach them to, to these old screws in the back of the TV.

And then you had to set it to Channel 3. There was no, I mean, the modern day, it's like input selector, HDMI, RGB, whatever. It's old school. Wow. I remember that when I had a huge, when I would talk about huge, I'm talking like this thing was probably two or three hundred pounds.

And it was a big screen TV. It was at least 30 something inches across. But it was in this giant wooden box. And it's like, you had to get a furniture dolly and be real careful with that thing. Jostle it too much. and all the components will shatter your stuff. Oh, yeah.

We had 25 years ago. Yeah, we had a TV that fell on me. Like the first big TV we had, and it was, it wasn't a flat smear. It was a thick TV, but it was big. Yeah.

And I was probably laying down. I was, like, kicking it. I was like jostling the stool that it was on and fell right on me. Well, that's a lesson learned, right? I wasn't heard at all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it hurt. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I bet it did. It's like, oh, right in the nuts. Something like that. So you are watching me.

Did you have a sense of yourself in the home environment, how you were dressed, any physical appearance details? No, I feel like I was wearing, like, just kind of whatever. I remember, like, on TV, I was wearing, I do remember on TV I was wearing, like, more casual clothes, but not, like, You know, the late night show host is wearing like this, what I'm wearing now,

where I'm wearing, like, a t-shirt and maybe khakis. Like, like, it's very, but I, like, but what I was wearing at home, probably, like, I don't know. I didn't care. Probably, like, laundry day clothes. Sure. No, no strong impression. It was specifically pink boxers and a, in a tie-died, you know, turtleneck or whatever.

No, it felt like if you were ever just watching the TV and, you're, you know, you don't even care what's on. It's not like that sort of day. Yeah. Or if you're doing interviews like me, not wearing pants. I mean, that's just how it is.

I'm at home. You'll never know. I am the wizard of no pants. And I can say that because really people will never know. Am I? Is he kidding? Is he wearing pants? I'm going to leave that.

I'm going to leave it a mystery. So that's interesting too. So you're, the clothing you're wearing at home, this is me rattling doorknoms. May or may not be. critically important, but it might have been if I forgot to ask. But it is interesting to see. So you're at home, you're just like relaxing. What you're wearing is not important that that image of

yourself as the observer isn't as relevant as what you're, what you're observing. And that guy was in a kind of, you know, you mentioned, you know, khakis in a T-shirt and that's almost along the lines of business casual. I mean, it's a step up from Sunday doing laundry clothes, where, you know, And he was, yeah, exactly. He looked more fit than I did. He looked like, like what someone might put on if they wanted to look like, they just kind of threw something on and they looked this good. It was like, oh, you know, it was a T-shirt, like, it was a planned casualness of this guy.

Very, very Machiavelli in this TV version of me. He was like, he knows exactly how I'm looking at him. Right. And you got that impression of him. He's crafting an image of himself to, yeah, for public display. Yeah. well yeah sometimes it goes quiet i'm writing uh yeah yeah just from wrong right and lately i've got a horrible problem with dry mouth just the more i talk

i sleep with a fan right on my face and oh my god waking up after sleeping with a fan in your face oh you got to like having like no yeah i've got one i've got one running in the where is it running in the background right here um worse than that and this is interesting you i see paffy i I sleep with a C. PAP. I actually have the horrible snoring problems. And I said, you know, Doc, hey, if I, injured here, but, hey, if I lost some weight, would that help? And they're like, no, probably not.

Actually, doesn't seem to affect it. Like, it isn't just, you know, all the fat choking me when I sleep. And she was like, no, it is what it is. You need it or you don't. It's kind of the shape of your soft palate and how it slup loosens and the muscle tone relaxes as you're asleep. And it just makes the horrible, breathing problems anyways i think that's part of it too is like a drying out my mouth in my sleep but

also i think just sweating and being probably uh what am i trying to say this is all horribly boring but uh dehydrated because it's hot in the damn summertime and i'm probably not drinking enough water so that's why i get i get my little little bottle while i'm doing these interviews keep the mouth moist people like that word right moist great word yes that's the only yes also one syllable m o two two two two vowels, one syllable. Moist. Yeah, we don't say moist or moist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Moist. I hope there are people out there going, stop saying that word. I've heard if people don't like it, so I'm totally leaning into that. Um, lunge. Exactly. That's another good one. Lunge and,

and even luge, luge, lots of great words. Um, any notable difference in a, physical body composition is one way to put it in different hair color, different size, shape, dimensions of this guy on TV. And, you know, it was you or it was a little bit different version of you.

He was a little bit better than it. Better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, like, a little bit better than I was.

Not that much. I mean, he was still fat, but he was, he had bigger, he had bigger biceps than I. Gotcha. And,

and, and he, he had like his hair was a little bit lighter mine mine's pretty dark he had and he didn't have glasses on i'm wearing glasses this guy wasn't okay gotcha yeah yeah and this is all the kind of details you would say okay well what was better so there's a in some ways an image of yourself like if you were to go on tv you would want people to see you like that you would want to be and this is a dream you've been you had long before you ever considered coming on to talk to me and this is the first time you're putting your face on the internet not even in your d and dd videos

I forgot about that. Like, are your, are your, are your players on screen, but you're not or? No, no, none of us are just voices. All audio.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. So, yeah, there was probably some consideration of that. Being a participant in the,

uh, the thinkers show and whatnot and just be, being now that you've, and, uh, running your own YouTube channels. Like, since you've never done that before,

uh, probably, there's some conception of, uh, you know, and we all want to present ourselves better. I mean, I sit here and,

And no matter what I'm wearing, I got these mobs. And I just, I try to adjust the shirts so they're less visible. But, you know, I could just lose some weight and I don't. So I'm just a fat, old wizard. And that's the way it is. I would want, you know, hopefully in my dream, I would want to present myself better. I would want to look better than actually doing real life because we all, we all want to. But it is interesting that there's a so there's a bit of a desire for that self presentation of a better format.

It's like, and it's interesting some of the, um. And he had a, he had a thicker beard too. Okay. I don't, he didn't have this patchy mess. He had a, yeah. Like, like, you look at that and you go, that's a beard. Gotcha. Well, when I was,

you look at this and you go, is that a beard? When I was younger, probably closer to your age, mine was a little thin as well. And this is like, I think I've probably been growing it out for 10 years now. And it really, it actually filled in the longer, I keep it there.

Like some of the shorter hairs that take longer to grow, that add some of the bulk. So I think if you, uh, let it ride, it'll, it will improve over time. I mean,

cross my fingers for you. Um, we would all want to, and I mean, even, I would say even fit athletic people might look at themselves and, you know, the TV adds 10 pounds. They're like, oh, I wish I'd lost a little more weight before I went on TV. So the, you have a bit of an idealized version of yourself. Okay, if I'm going to be on public display, I'm going to be in better shape. I'm going to have bigger biceps.

My interesting, interesting thing, lighter, slightly lighter colored hair. Not sure where that fits in. Maybe you think just black hair is not as interesting as another color. Well, it's, it's closer to like, um, it's probably closer to my brother's hair color. He has lighter brown hair. I have darker brown hair. Okay.

So a little bit of maybe admiration for his presentation. Like if you could emulate someone, no. Okay. No, he's, he's, he's, he's fine. I'm not, I love my brother, obviously. I'm not, sure. I'm not, I'm not jealous of the way he presents himself. Gotcha.

Any, well, any, this is tough. I'm asking about private personal. He's not here. to defend himself. It is about your perception, but I don't want to do anything with your relationship with you. Okay, don't answer.

But the question I was going to ask is along the lines of, if there's something that comes to mind, how do I ask the question? What I get in my head and what I think could be relevant, I'm not sure, but the idea of

there may be something you either wish to emulate because you admire or wish to avoid because you consider it a negative quality. And if I ask that question and then you tell me it's a negative quality, then you're kind of, you know, dogging your brother on the internet, which I don't want to put you in that position. If it's a- We can edit it out, though.

I'll tell you. I'll be honest with you, I think it's inappropriate. Okay. I mean, my brother, he, he, like, who cares? Okay. He's fine. He's a, I don't think he's a pretty outgoing guy. I don't think he'll mind.

Gotcha. Well, that would be kind of my question is, is there anything that immediately comes to mind that you would, a quality of his you would wish to not adopt because you're not probably. proud of it or a quality you would want to more embody because you admire. If there's something there related to the hair color, it's complete tangent possibly. And you might go, no, nothing I can think of. Okay, moving on. It's up to you. Yeah, well, both.

My brother, first of all, my brother's very silly. And I don't want to, I'm kind of a silly person, but he's like a very, very silly person. Okay. Like a very silly type of individual. And I'm like, I don't want to be that silly. He wears, he wears, you know, cotton candy, how it's blue and pink, like those two colors. That those are, those are his colors of choice. Cotton candy, blue, and cotton candy pink.

He's a strange person. But he's a hardworking person. He's a dedicated person. Like a good person, like a little silly. Yeah, he's a good, he's a good, he's a little silly. He's a good person. Okay, that's interesting, that idea of silliness. And you could have, okay, so you could be looking at this idealized version of yourself.

And just the moment it came to throwing on the hair color, the tangent was, brother, silliness. I think even this representation of me enhanced still feels silly. I do think, I do think it's just like the way, the way I pictured on. on TV. It's probably just because my brother looks a lot like me, but slightly different. And so I was describing like the slight difference as I was like close to my brother. I don't

think that my brother having that color hair is like necessarily like the crux of it. That's just how I was describing it. Yeah. There might be something that there might not. And if it feels right we go with it and if it if you're like I don't know and then forget it.

It's not not that critical. I was looking for little stuff that kind of opens, opens, it gives a little additional context to the picture. Yeah. But also then not glasses. So there's like,

this is, this is, in, in ways an idealized or enhanced version of yourself. But you also get this idea that he's, he's Machiavellian, crafting this appearance to, um,

make himself more appealing or likable. Um, or to win, win over approval. Like to, to give. non what am I trying to say there's there's making a good argument and there's appealing to others to win them over for non argument reasons you kind of get where I'm

going with that there's different ways to sway the crowd there's softistry and socratic method in broadly speaking and kind of putting a hot girl in your in your Pepsi ad is a bit of the sophistry side of things it's like we just want you to associate Pepsi with hot girls and want to buy our product. The other side of things would be like, what is it? Some of the commercials, the Liberty Mutual,

it's like, only pay for what you need. It's like they're selling it on the reason side. Now, they're selling it with Limu the Emu and silly fun, but they're also selling their product in terms of what it does. It's like you can pick and choose.

What we offer is, is customizable ability. And progressive auto insurance said, shout out to you guys owe me money now. sponsor the show, please. So, long story short, I don't know if that's speaking to you in any way of this idea of this guy's being a little manipulative

Machiavellian with his presentation on purpose to sell his view of this issue, this idea that he's representing on stage. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, I think that if I were to go, if someone was like, you got a month to be on a big show, like, like, if I was going on,

I don't even know, big shows. Tim Poole maybe in a month. I'd probably be like, okay, I'll lose like 10 pounds. I'll lose like 5 pounds. I might also, I might not, but I might, yeah.

Actually, actually, come to think of it. I'd probably, I'd probably work out one day and be like, I'm gonna go back to, this isn't worth it. Yeah, this isn't me. That's why I've kind of embraced the whole. I'm just a fat old wizard type of thing. Whatever.

That's me. That's me. You know, and somebody maybe, but, but, go ahead. I do, I do think you're right in the sense that he's, doing the, like, concerned about the outward appearance. Like, I'm wearing a three-piece suit right now. It almost feels super critical to be like my dream clone was a little bit concerned about his outward appearance right now.

Well, there's an interesting thing going on here too, which is, I mean, just get meta on our, our experience is like, when it's your first time being on TV, you don't want to be like, or internet thing, putting your face out there, you don't want to be like, I didn't take a shower, I didn't put on clean t-shirt, I didn't brush my teeth or whatever. you know, all the things that you would look the first time, you're making a first impression. So it's a little, there's a little bit of a raised bar on our own minds of,

man, I don't want to screw this up too badly. So sometimes we go a little overboard or we're like, I think this is the outfit that makes me look the best. And I'm going to really, I'm going to shine. Well, I'm going to, I, this was just because I do the Jordan Peterson voice. And I was like, well, what is Jordan Peterson wear? Ah, there you go. He wears the suits and the, that's what this is.

It's very intentional, you know, because when you have a character, you don't want to throw out that character the first. time you make it big you know so you foster it a little bit just a little reference in a voice here or there um but but i i it's it's it's it's a different kind of not because this is like a like jokingly fancy for what we're doing right now gotcha but but he he's in the dream he's intentionally making it look like this is just how he looked yeah yeah like it's it's a t-shirt and it's it's it's it's i mean if it's intentional or manipulative in some ways it's it's it's almost feels fake,

feels false. Yeah. Feels like intended to deceive. Which is like that guy dresses like this because he's a maniac every day. But when he goes on TV without word appearance, he's like, I'm just like you, gang. He's like a politician like taking off his tie when he's doing like the,

he's like, I'm just like every single one of you. I'm a good old boy. Yeah, yeah. We're wearing the flannel in the rural areas and the suits in the cities. Exactly. Like that sort of thing. Modifying your,

your accent like Hillary Clinton. I ain't in no ways tired. You don't talk like that. Shut up. I ain't tired of none. Right? That's funny. Why, Miss Clinton, you seem to, your voice seems to have changed by a bet.

Why, you could be my neighbor. All right. So we were talking about the description of the guy. So now the set of the talk show. When you think talk show of this particular one, does any, any show from particular show from the past come to mind. You know, they each had different setups. It was David Letterman, that kind of, you know,

Johnny Carson set up with the desk and the couch. Or there's Jerry Springer style, you know, where it's more of a stage and there's multiple chairs. It's more like desk couch. Okay. It's very similar to like, I mean, the Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel show, Conan Show.

I mean, those, like that, it was none of those particular guys, but it was like that desk couch set up. General kind of kind of thing. Yeah, like, like the kind of like you're on the desk and you're saying, you know, how are you doing this? And I've got one arm over the side and my legs across and I'm like, well, you see Jimmy White guy. That sort of effect, like very, nothing particular about it. Yeah. And that was going to be my next question is kind of how the physical setup was, compose. When you're looking at the TV, the desk and interviewer was on the right and the couch on the left.

And you were, you know, the you on TV were casually reclined on the couch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. While I don't know what we were talking about prior, but something, something. Yeah, like very casual sort of set up. Okay. And yourself on the TV, you were on the couch. Yeah. Gotcha. And do you remember anything about the interviewer? a sense of of what they looked like or or um might have been modeled not at all no uh so but there was a person there was no impression of that person yeah yeah there there was there was somebody there there was something going on in the show but they're like my my guy wasn't hosting it like i wasn't hosting it there was a host but my guy was a guest brought on to do a thing

gotcha so um we might say because that detail was lacking it was more the setting itself of being on a talk show as the guest rather than a specific show with a specific person. If we, um, yeah, if we said it was definitely Jimmy Kimmel or definitely David Letterman that might say something about some additional context, but it wasn't. It was actually no, you don't scratch that paper. Quit it. Um, it's, it's less about which show or more about talk shows in general because there was a host. Definitely. to round out the the image. You know, we would expect a host to be there, therefore he is.

It just makes sense. But not, not the particular guy. Do you remember anything that was asked of that person, or were they simply soliloquizing about their opinion? And what did they, did they say anything in particular or? No, I don't remember anything that was exchanged there. I remember just the vague idea of, me seeing myself on a talk show.

So you don't remember hearing any words, fair enough, but the general discussion topic, the introduction to the act of then smashing the jars. I mean, what was that person saying about what was going to happen? It was vaguely about abortion rights needed to be protected.

It was like a pro-abortion thing. It was pro-choice. Okay. It's a TV me. Gotcha. So this person is very much, if we say this is a conflicted idea within yourself or a version of a potential idea of yourself, you know, at the very least considering what you think and, let's say the side of you that has sympathy or understanding for that perspective is now being represented as this person stating this opinion publicly in a public venue. with a rather crafted external display of hoping to win over the crowd by, in some sense, hook or by crook, but also by being genuine and honest.

This is what I believe. Let me tell you why. So it seems like the consideration of this dream. And of course, it seems obvious too, but we kind of kind of say it out loud is you are, in a sense, watching a theoretical thought experiment of what would it be like? if I took this opinion and expressed it and tried to sell it as, you know, an idea that has merit in some way. Am I explaining it in a way that makes sense and does it kind of feel right? Yeah.

Yeah, something like that. Okay, good deal. And this is. Yeah. Yeah. And what we don't want to do is jump to a conclusion of like, oh, well, we've solved it. This is what you actually believe. You're just watching yourself be honest with people.

Very often we are conflicted on an idea. We're like, where do I fall in the spectrum of? absolutely nothing to absolutely everything, you know, black and white and type of deal. Shades of gray in between. And you actually got this visual representation of shades of gray with the different fetuses. And it's like, where is this line? Where does it go from? I'm not comfortable with this to, or I am definitely not uncomfortable with that, um, is the idea. Um, so and it is, it is good to have the, the, the contextual, it's kind of spelled out in your mind that the, the, the person. you are imagining you could be or watching yourself experimenting with this idea of saying these things publicly explicitly says it and it's and in your you're putting in their mouth in a way in their expression a good faith steel man in a way of what they believe you know they are they say abortion rights must be protected so there is at least a part of you that is considering that seriously whether or not you endorse it because

you're also separating yourself from this idea, which is, this is a fantastic representation, too, of the meta-cognitive concept of saying, I don't know what I believe. So I'm going to hold out this idea in front of me and let the idea be its own thing. The idea of me adopting that position, what would that look like? How would I feel about that? And we don't commit to it. We simply hold it up for examination. And that's a great thing that I wish more people did consciously, intentionally more often of like, you know, instead of letting our ideas embody and habit or possess us, we kind of say, okay, I have had a thought. I have had a feeling.

Let me go ahead and examine it. I'm neither going to push it away nor pull it close. I'm just going to let it be what it is. And think about it. So I see that kind of is what's going on in this dream, if that makes sense. And yeah, and we do that. I mean, that's, it especially makes sense because that's, this was a fairly recent dream. like when I commented it

to when I commented it under your video that was like pretty recent after I had it so it went however long ago that was yeah and it's something we

we do a lot as the thinkers is like verbalize a lot of conflictions we have because we all have very similar philosophies about having to work something like that out but we might have different ideas

and we're verbalizing everything we disagree with yeah for sure it's a four it's a four hour show and we get to a lot. Yeah, definitely. And I love that idea, too, of, of there's a debate where you're trying to win, and you're not going to win over the opponent. The opponent has a different opinion.

And very rarely does anyone go, you know, in this debate that was very contentious and confrontational and very hard fought, you have swayed my opinion. I now agree with you. That almost never happens. We have statistical outlier, statistically non-existent, I would say, that, that ever happening. In a debate, you're trying to win over the audience. but in a discussion, you're trying to understand an idea and all the connecting dots and all the mind map connected ideas of a central topic.

Here's all the radiating spokes and how they relate to each other. And I think that's, I mean, I would say that's the best way to come to a better understanding, which then allows you to take a position. It's like if you haven't kind of done through that mental math thoroughly enough, I don't think you are justified in having an opinion. in my opinion. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's sort of what we, we think that everything should be challenged. And I think that too. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because this is all about me right now,

but, but in, extending some charity to my fellow thinkers, that's what we believe. Absolutely. No, and I think that's one reason you are,

you know, welcome to participate, is because you have that similar perspective on the purpose of meeting to discuss these ideas, is that it has a purpose,

that it's a good thing to do. And even when you're trying to get the bottom of ideas that's there's still that uh we call it debate brain where like you don't want to give up you might even start arguing for things you don't agree with i've done that like i mean i've never done right right because like you get pushed in that corner and you see this as adversarial but we're trying to facilitate this environment where it's okay to be wrong and it's it's okay or it's okay to just be like i i understand where you're coming from yeah definitely definitely

No, I think it's very important. I think those are the best. That's why I like watching, you know, talking head internet videos is I cannot possibly. So I call this the wisdom of the crowd. Now, it isn't, there's one way of looking at that, which is the wisdom of the crowd expressed democratically. Well, whatever most people think or believe.

That's not how I think of it. I think of it as the wisdom of the crowd is brainstorming. It is the totality of all the potential complexity. The more people you bring into it, the more different perspectives, eventually you've covered. everything. There's nothing left to cover. You've exhausted the potential of angles to view this and perspectives to assert. That's, in my opinion, the true wisdom of the crowd is the totality of the breadth and the depth of the thinking. An individual person cannot have all the thoughts possible on any

given subject. Our lives are not long enough to do that, you know. Even if we think we have, it's probably still superficial compared to what you could accomplish with a larger group of people. that's my rant on the wisdom of the crowd wisdom of the crowd is in brainstorming so to speak so yeah so I mean this this this self-examination by dreams like you're dreaming your normal cognitive process on things well let me examine this and look at it let's give a hypothetical I think that's what a lot of people do unconsciously

but it seems a little more directly depicted I'm literally going to watch myself as if I'm this this version of me this version of me which believes a specific idea is advocating for it in a public forum and I'm just going to observe what that looks like to me as from the more neutral I'm one of the home viewers it's not even really me but then it is later that's that's interesting too how does it transition to the demonstration is there any it it sort of just feels like a yada yada yada abortion rights and then wheel out like pan out to like the big stage and then some jars and then grab the sledgehammer and start working.

And what I want to do is try and get a visual representation of, so the person is sitting there, maybe being a little shmarmie, like a faux casual. Let me tell you all of this stuff. And, yeah, yeah, yeah, casual, kind of composed casual representation. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Was it kind of a, you know, monologuing and I'm going to show you something or how did

the how did the you on the couch kind of transition into that? Like, did they just come to the end of a statement, jump up and walk over? It feels more like a segment change, but like a segment change with a transition. Like, on the couch feels like, feels like the, oh, we're talking how much we love abortion. And then like music, pan out, walk over. Here's what we're going to show you. Okay. And the, um, the host in. your in your experience of that scene seemed to be on board or at least not challenging it wasn't a contentious discussion the person wasn't arguing it was more like uh they were in agreement it was an agreement it was uh it was i'm bringing this person on so they can tell you the importance of this thing so the way i'm conceptualizing that is it's definitely more of a friendly venue than a yeah very very friendly venue yeah almost like my guy almost like i was a

celebrity on the panel. Yeah. This version of me. Nice. Like, people are like, we love this is the abortion guy. Like, we love this guy. He's going to talk about how much he loves it. Yep.

By the way, Gatorade, you also owe me money. Okay, there we go. Free advertising. Diet co goes me money. Exactly. So, and that's interesting, too, because it very well could have been, you imagine this idea being challenged by the interviewer or having this be an unfriendly venue.

That could have been another. I like to, I like to tease out in my brain like, okay, what's the alternative? It's a different way of this being presented. But instead, you're like, okay, imagine you're in a place where you're not being challenged on this. You're being supported. It's a friendly venue. So you're imagining that the idea is given full good faith in a way.

It's not being misrepresented. It's not being attacked. It's just it is what it is. It's being allowed to be seen for what it is unchallenged. And sometimes we've got to go with that. We've got to say, okay, what if I actually believe this thing? in this way, what would it look like and how would it be fully expressed if there was no one trying to push back or, you know, misrepresent? It's like, so there's that, yeah, I want to say this is a more accurate, truthful, honest, full expression of what this means versus something that's something else.

And this is the, this is the, the less defensible position. is what this is. Okay, that's what comes to your mind. Or is that your, your, understanding of what I'm trying to say? That, that's what I'm sort of bridging the two,

what's in my mind, what you're saying is, this is sort of like, when you watch, like, friendly people, they might not, like,

they might say the quiet part out loud. Gotcha. Sort of like that. So, this, this is the, the field, the walled field,

and not, castle. Gotcha. That's a fantastic way to put it. And I'm glad that was your idea rather than what you thought I was trying to say. But it's a great way to put it. So the, um, if you have a Bailey and it is less defensible, there needs to be a certain amount of charity from your interlocutor, or whoever you're discussing with to kind of accept it for what it is. Um, and in a way that like does not make you defensively retreat to a stronger position. You can just say this is, this is what it is in all its glory warts and all in some ways um and uh you know it sometimes we illustrate the absurd by being absurd absurd or take things to their logical conclusion which may be

pretty far down so if we go with this principle you realize that allows for xyz to happen i think that's part of what's going on here like if we if we say abortion rights unrestricted to the extreme literally no limits it's going to smash all the jars that's the absurdist or a logical conclusion of that principle. So just say, okay, what is this thing and how would it work in practice? This is what it would look like. And so any, I want to see in my, and it may not be that relevant, but the, I want to see in my brain the, the, the, the layout of the jars, like, are they a specific type of jar?

Is it on a long table? Are they each on their own pedestal? Kind of how do you? Yeah. it's a long table and it's like almost wheeled out and they're I don't know what type of jars

they are like I can't seem to remember if I thought they were like plain mason jars or if they were like future artistic artificial like somewhere in the middle like they looked like plain mason jars but somehow I like knew looking at them that they were more

like artificial wombs so there's actually something gestating inside of that knees. So, like, this isn't like a, like a science shelf. This is like something that is viable, let's say. Gotcha. And that was a key part that we were going to get to next is that the, what was being smashed was not a, like, okay,

there's a traveling show called BodyWorks. Do you ever heard of that? Yeah. No, I haven't. Oh, fair enough. So what it is is, they, uh, recently, I don't know how many years ago, developed a method of plasticizing bodies, like embalming them with plastic in the way that you could say carve away all the flesh and leave just the muscles and the

bones and the skull and maybe, you know, faux eyeballs in there and or real eyeballs. I don't even know. But, but so you could see actual bodies and not a, not a, not a, not a, not a live, you know, carving up a cadaver type of thing. But it is a cadaver. That's a, real person. There was, as a part of this traveling exhibit, a circular room that you could walk into and it had one kind of entrance and then, so like an elongated, very, very spheroid circular horseshoe in a way. You walk in through the door and then on the left is the earliest blastocyst or whatever

they call it, like the cell that is barely merged. and you can't even see it's like floating in a thing and they're like in jars and these lit up things and it's every stage of fetal development it's the first thing i thought of when you told me that i'm like i'm like i've seen that i know exactly what that looks like actually i've seen it in real life and they are and i'm thinking that but but yours but in that they're like dead they're they're not attached to anything they're just in like the green liquid floating around or whatever like they're they're they're pickled but this is like they they resemble mason jars but they're They're keeping the things alive somehow.

So these are mation jar-shaped artificial wounds, basically. Yeah. And I, um, what was it trying to say? Clear liquid. So everything is easily seen? Um, lit up, illuminated, but I think it was clearly. Okay. It may not be, but just for my own being able to see it.

Um, and definitely, yeah, okay, okay, the long story short of my telling you that story was the fetuses in the jars were great. as you described, they were, you know, obviously not alive, not being kept alive. That was not the point. They were even, I don't even know how they preserved them, if they were plasticized as well. But it's a very different experience. And I think it's very critical that these are all alive. And he's going to show you what it means to be, to fully express that opinion in a physical fact that what it means for an abortion to take place that at each stage of development, these.

living things are going to be destroyed. And when you, okay, there was a certain point, let me just prefer, okay, so in the very beginning, like when he grabbed the sledgehammer and walked over there, were you having any response or reaction as the viewer? It was like, oh, wow, that's kind of weird. But like, not, like, at first, nothing,

and then concern grows. Gotcha. And that was my, that was my, uh, specific question that expressed probably poorly, but right at the very beginning, it was a sense of,

oh, this is weird, but not distress or, yeah, revulsion or anything. It was more of a neutral, um, dispassionate observation.

Um, yeah, basically. Okay. And that, you know, and so speaking of for myself, I also have a kind of,

I think your display of this in this imagery resonates with me personally, in my opinion as well. Like at a certain stage of, you know, it's a few cells growing. I have no feeling about that, even if it is maybe technically a life. But I don't feel like it is. And I don't know. No emotion regarding it. The closer gets to look in human and to pop it as a actual squealing, you know, a human being. it becomes more and more distasteful.

I become more and more uncomfortable personally with that idea. And so you, was there a, let's see, how many jars would you say there were? You know, there were five, there were 20, 5,000. There were 10. It was an even number. It was, it was from first just fertilization to nine months. Okay. So it was from zero to nine.

Yeah, yeah. So almost one month apart in a way. Yeah. Yeah, but also 10. It's an interesting number. It's an even number. So it can be evenly divided. There's something in there that might suggest a balanced understanding.

There are exactly five on one side and five on the other. The scales are equal. But more than that, there's also a one to 10 scale. How, you know, we do that in our, if this resonates with you. But the idea that occurred to me is, I'm not surprised that there were exactly 10. Because you're like, how much do I endorse a given idea scale of one to 10? I'm about a three. you know or how how important is this thing to you it's a seven you know that kind of thing

and the classic you know how hot you know hot or not scale one to ten yeah the highly scientific scale yeah but we conceive that a lot in our in our brains of like we give to give something a percentage i'm about 80 percent we have we have ten fingers i think that that's what it is it's that too yeah and fingers do something on your body to to like relate that too Mm-hmm. If we had eight fingers, I'm sure we'd use base eight counting. I think we would. I think you're damn right.

We would. And that would be very interesting, wouldn't it? Things could have been completely different. You know, one, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten. Yep, just like that. Or how we'd be one, two, three, five, six, seven, ten. That's right. It wouldn't be eight.

Yep. Because, yeah, because we go nine and then ten. One zero, yeah, yeah. One zero, yeah. That blows my mind. I'm not a math guy. I'm not a math magician. but the idea that, yeah, there's a base 8 county.

That blew my mind when I first thought of that. And then we watch shows like, you know, typical you're familiar with that. And then Ian brings up, well, you know, tennis and 10 if we're counting in base 8, like, kudos. But that's not what we're talking about. You are technically correct, sir. Off topic. I think base 12 is probably the best, I think.

Base 12 system. I know. Because it's, you're thinking about what it's like we have 365, 365 days. So that's almost 360. Yeah. And then we have 260 degrees in a circle. So that's all divisible by 12, but 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds and a minute, 24 hours in a day. But then also it's divisible by two.

It's divisible by three. It's divisible by four. It's divisible by five and six. Yeah. Not quite seven. So I think that's... Yeah. Well, I don't think about 12 months.

That's like so convenient. One through six, all divisible. I think we used to almost be in a base 12. Not quite. Not quite. but but the idea of 12 and you know um 12 inches in a foot uh there was a there was a time when that was a was a more it was a more important number than 10 in a way it was it was it was it was considered a more perfect number in a way and i don't know that they were counting in

base 12s but the idea you know 12 signs of the zodiac and and the year being broken up into 12 months because of different cycles of the sun. Well, also because three and four are both such convenient numbers to work with that like when, okay, so we have four seasons. We think about that. Of three months each. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, four clear seasons in a temperate zone, but like in that into thirds, like early season, midseason, late season.

And it just becomes so convenient like that. And it happens to line up with everything else. Yeah. Almost like there is a God. Right. Exactly. There are some very... I don't believe... I don't believe in God, but sometimes I'm like, but maybe, though.

Yeah. It's tough to say, oh, it was made that way on purpose. Or we kind of... We kind of made it that way, but... But it fits nicely. Like, the world is ordered. Yeah, it does appear to be ordered. Now, what ordered it and why? Hey, it could be a coin... Could have been a coin toss. Who knows? I... It took me a long time to get around to this, but I thought, you know, it could have been that God said, let there be the Big Bang. Hey, and the idea, I was listening to another podcast.

I don't know why people like what, like people like, you ever, there's a little dicky song called, called Pillow Talk. And one of his, one of his lines in it is, why can't God fuck with aliens? Like, she's like, I'm a Christian. I believe in aliens. He's like, why not?

You're the decider of what God can do? What are you talking about? Well, of course, then our mission is to start the great space jihad and, convert the universe to Christianity because, Well, if God did make aliens and they probably have like alien Jesus too. They might. So like who says he wouldn't have gone to other planets and and show them the way for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. That reminds me of a great Heinland book, The Stranger in a Strangeland Lane. That was a great one. I love that. That needs a, that needs a Game of Thrones treatment. That's a great book. Lots of new to have you. Have you read?

HBO would love that. Yeah. Have you read All Tomorrow's? No, no. It's like a like a. body horror. It's about humans millions and millions and billions of years into the future.

Oh, boy. How they evolve. And one of the things that happens is we discover a planet full of tripetal, copper-boned species. But there was one species that's quadrupedal calcium bone. And we're like, how the hell is there a quadrupedal caffeine? Like that's like an Earth species.

Yeah, yeah. Like four calcium bones. And they're like, this means there's a god. And they set out to looking for God again and they don't like what they find they they they find something that's cruel and and godlike but but not not like they're not doing it yeah that's very interesting too is that the way i can see way off on a tangent i love this stuff the way i conceive of gods that's good for clips well sure no and i should maybe write this down too it's like oh it gets all get all metaphysical and spiritual here um the way i conceive of

God or gods is as necessarily immaterial. It's the truth of a category in a sense. That's why I love the depiction of the Greek gods is it spells it out a little more clearly than the monotheistic Christian version of it, which I think is still speaking to the same thing, just melds all those things into one and gives a different explanatory system. But the idea that there is a, there is such a thing as war. There is a physical phenomenon in the world called war. we fight other people and one side wins and there's the, you know, the glory and the suffering and all

this difference of the reasons we go to war and there's, you know, so to think of war as a God, it's true. It's a real category of thing that happens that seems to have its own cohesive spirit to it. So, and the goddess of love. We feel love. Why do we feel love? Well, this, this, you know, we are in a feeling that belongs to a category. So there's, you know, in that sense, all these things are real, very real to my mind, you know, even

though they're immaterial. But there's two gods of war. And there's, there's, there's, uh, Ares who's always depicted as fiery and wearing helms and swords and spears. And there's Athena who's also the goddess of wisdom. Yeah. So, so there, there's this, there's the god of, he's more like the god of violence. And then there's Athena who's more like the god of strategy, which is, uh, also very

interesting. And in some ways, the wisdom of a just war. Like, do we really need to be fighting? Well, think about it. before you jump in with both feet. Yeah, aggressor and defender. Yeah. So Ares is the aggressor.

Athene is the defender. Like, she's the... The siege. Aries is the siege master. Athena is the... Like, whatever, you know? But, yeah. In my D&D world, I try to, you know,

integrate both these. There's a monotheistic god who's basically like just the overarching order. And then there's spirits and spirits can be godlike to humans. Like there's like the river spirit who might be regional, like the spirit that dominates this region, sort of like tribes might have the river spirit, you know, like how many gods in the Nile do you think they are? That's a giant river ran through all sorts of places. True.

Yeah. And kind of different levels of gods too. It's like in subservient categories of things, almost like, you know, this, you know, genus species phylum, that kind of thing. And that's where you get the idea that the goddess of love, Aphrodite has a child who is eros, one particular expression of love. And then they were actually, like the Greeks had what, like seven or eight different descriptions of love, familial love, brotherly love, the love for humanity in general. And these are all things we kind of encapsulate under the umbrella of that term. Love was okay, well, which kind do you mean?

And we've just lost those specific names. We don't use them anymore, which maybe we should. Maybe this is agape. This is the love for mankind and love for all for all people versus eros. You know, you reserve eros for, you know, you're a polycule or whatever you call it or significant other. Okay, long tangent. We should get back giving you an answer. So we were described all of this from there are 10 jars.

And as you're watching this, you know, you go from no reaction to a growing sense of dread or really it doesn't hit you until that nine. nine-month jar, the 10th one. I would say that 1 through 3, so 0-1, 2 months, I'm pretty nonchalant. And after that, I'm, like, starting to feel disgusted.

So it's almost like 1 through 3, disgusted, 4 through 6. 1 through 3, nonchalant, 4 through 6 disgusted. And then after I feel disgusted, I run down, and then

seven through nine happened while like switching scenes basically if that's that makes like swings like I didn't actually like in my dream

run to the studio I don't know where a studio is but yeah yeah but out the door and I'm there and then they're on the 10th jar just as I get there and that's the horrified

okay and then you said that's where and it was after smashing that 10th jar that you became that person and it was not before it was not before Okay.

It was as the jar smash, I see it smash, but then I'm holding it. So it was very sudden. Yeah. So if we're conceiving this, conceptualizing it as a thought experiment, what would it look like to live this point of view in the world? The moment that crossed a line or became too real or became objectionable, then it became you holding the sledgehammer because you're like, okay, I'm looking at this as an idea that I could adopt. I'm assessing this idea for validity and comfort level with how I view the world and

what I think is good and true and right. And I think it's that moment where the switch flips, what am I trying to say? You realize if I adopt this point of view, that's going to be me. I'm going to be that guy. If I embrace this point of view fully to its complete. logical conclusion smashing all 10 jars, if I accept this as my worldview, then I become that person. I embody that idea that I'm just examining. Does that make sense? That that makes, yeah, that does make sense. Like, like, I'm responsible for it now. But that's the feeling I got at the end. Like, like, this was me. Yeah. If I decide that this is acceptable, then I will live this. I will become this person that I have here tofore only theoretically held out as a possibility.

Once you commit to the idea, then that's who you become. But we can choose not to. You can say, I don't like that at all. So I think you were kind of showing yourself not, this is what I believe and this is what I want. But if you come down on this side of the line, identify with this idea, this is the reality. you will live out in your life. What I say is, you know, beliefs become behavior.

That's kind of one of my little aphorisms. That's what you believe determines what you do. It's kind of like what you worship is, you know, or your practices of worship show the God that you're praying to in a sense. It's all these different metaphorical ways of saying it. And you were, and it was to the applause of the crowd. So I think it's not particularly relevant that the crowd is silent. It may or may not be, but from what you said, you don't often hear sound in your dreams.

So it's, it's no, like, I don't notice smells, but I'm never like, oh, my God, I couldn't smell in that drink. Because I just wouldn't have, but it's very, very often, if I remember, like the sound, the sound is silence. it's very common for me to wake up and be like, why weren't my ears working? Okay, fair enough. So it's a very notable absence of sound. But I think you're right in the sense that I'm like, it's not particular to this like sequence of events.

It's like, it's just like throughout my dreams for whatever reason I'm deaf. Now, what I was going to ask you is, is this only notable after you wake up? You're like, oh, I look back. and there was no sound. Or as you're dreaming,

you're like, why am I not hearing things? Sometimes both. Like, like, if there's usually, like, when watching TV, I don't,

TV might be on mute. Like, if I wake up, I'm like, weird that there was no sound, but, but at the moment there's applause, I'm like,

why aren't I hearing anything right now? Okay. So in this dream, it was a, notable observation in the dream. In the moment. Yeah. In the moment.

Okay. Now that's different. So just exploring that concept a little bit. Broadly speaking, if this theme continues, speaking of Peterson, broadly speaking, he loves to say. Broadly speaking, you know what? And then rescue your father, et cetera, which is fantastic conceptualization. I love all of his mythical analysis.

Man, that's right at my alley. That's good stuff. You think you can just kill Tiamette without. putting the work in. Well, you got another thing coming, Bucco, because let me tell you something about T.M. At she's scary as hell. Yeah. And more than that,

she's not dead until you transform her to order. If there's no order, if there's no transformation into order, if there's no work done, it remains T.M. at the Dragon in Chaos. You have to transform chaos. You've got to kill the chaos, but you can't just kill all of it.

There's some good in chaos, so you've got to rip out her womb. Right, and save it in a jar for later. You got to cut open and you got to perform a C-section on the corpse. And it's very interesting that, I mean, this, I love these old myths too, because the idea of chaos, order is made of chaos. You have to, I mean, chaos is almost the default. It's an entropy in some ways.

And we have to. I don't, I don't, I don't, there's some myths where chaos comes from the order. Well, where order is the default. In real life, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I don't. theist atheist split, which is why you're agnostic as you go, well, chaos is the thing. And we're here because order arrived where a Christian would say, or is the default and chaos is a disgusting aberration. Gotcha. Or maybe a necessary aberration of the order. And then there's actually me, which, so I was half done. And I think you're right. And that's a fantastic observation. That's

absolutely correct. I look at it as cyclical is that they are two halves to the same whole that cannot exist. Yeah. Yeah, me, me too. And then there actually neither one came first, necessarily. necessarily, which is interesting because if you go in the Christian mythology, as I would put it, all was without form and void, and then God said, let there be light. You know, he brought order to the chaos. So even as, but then

God preexisted the chaos. Or it was the absence of order is chaos in the way that darkness is the absence of light, in that sense. In my, in my myth, I tried to write a creation myth of my own, but it's not, I mean, I'm, I did write it.

It's trying to figure out the wording, but The idea is- exploring the idea, sure. God's sister or wife, or maybe sister-wife, at the same time, they exist. They're just eternal concepts, order and chaos. But in order for things to exist, there can't be chaos at the same level as order. So God has to create something and kill chaos who wants to destroy everything. Oh, yeah.

Well, the excess of one or the other is death. I mean, it's is, is, is, and there's a death. There's a death there, too. There's three things. There's order, chaos, and neutrality, which is death. Death is the ultimate neutrality. Yeah. And then the balance, too, of the need for both is, and I think the human body is a great example

of this. You need muscles and flexibility. You can't be a rigid structure locked in place where you can't move. You can't go out and acquire resources to keep you alive. Then again, you have to have bones that form a, rigid structure the muscles can pull against. You have to have dedicated organs that perform a specific function, not just any function, a specific, but you have to have a stomach to process as food that you go out and acquire. So you need this blending of ordering chaos that is, I think,

exemplified in the physical body. And your bone specifically, you need calcium and carbon because if there's too much of one, you know, too much carbon, too brittle, too much calcium, too flexible. Or maybe the other way, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So under chaos, nothing has any shape. It can it is nothing. It can be nothing. It is nothingness itself in some ways. It's just everything all at once everywhere. Okay.

And right? I do want to see that, but I haven't yet. No spoiler. La la la la. On the order side, order complete absolute order is rigidity. Nothing moves. Nothing changes. It is everything locked in just a

frozen stasis forever. Also, no different than complete chaos. These poles cannot it always has to be a blending of the two in my estimation. And that's something that, and that's, well, just on this subject, that's how I conceive the left-right divide is that broadly

speaking, the left worships the new change, chaos. And that's what we need. The chaos is the capacity for improvement in its expressed best sense. The right, broadly speaking, I think worships order. And it is the necessary structure and stability.

of bones in an organism that you can't do without. You cannot have a complete lack of structure. You can't have a complete lack of ability to change. So we've got to have this tension, broadly speaking. And I do some people disagree with, oh, well, left, right has to do with monarchy and socialism and all that stuff. I think those are all downstream from broadly chaos worship and order worship. I think it's all a religious war.

This is what I've come to recently. I don't know if you have thoughts on that. It's a complete tangent. I think that's totally true. I think, well, you know, you know, you know how to have a body. because if you stay still, you're not going to run off a cliff, but the bear might catch up to you. And running off a cliff and getting eaten by a bear are kind of the same thing.

But if you run too fast, the bear ain't going to catch you, but you might just fall off a cliff you don't see. And let me tell you, Bucco, there are more cliffs than you think in this world. There's a hell of a lot. There are, absolutely. Yeah. And there are bear traps. And I think that's what comes down to a lot of these mythological and religious structures

is what's a bear? how does it work? Where does it live? Where are the cliffs? And we're trying to explain to ourselves, what does it look like, feel like, what's the experience of being human, and how do we navigate that in the best possible way?

I consider the Bible, you know, from my agnostic atheist perspective, one of many examples of people trying to say, you know, pass down common frameworks, conceptualizations of cyclical human patterns. Here's things you're likely to experience, kind of a best practice guide.

Well, the Jews also got the most right, because they're the ones that's like, like, you ever read, you've read Leviticus, and that's, that's the laws. And you, modern day, you might think this is crazy, but like, wash your hand, nobody washed their hands back then, except for the Jews. They wash their hands every time they came into contact with, like, something nasty. And lo and behold, 5,000 years later, we're like, washing your hands really helps. Can you believe, I don't know if it was 150, 200 years ago, surgeons did not wash their hands between, you know, eating lunch and working on the next guy

and cutting off the next guy's leg. And this was back in Civil War times. They had no idea of that maybe it was a use sanitation. Yeah. In India, there were two like maternity awards. One that was led by doctors and students and one that was led by mid midwives. And one of them had a near, had an astronomically high mortality rate. And one of them had a near zero. But it's the opposite of which one you might think. The doctors killed more people than the midwives because the midwives washed their hands. They had almost a religious tradition

of hand washing as a ritual for the process. And maybe even the practitioners at that time didn't know, oh, this is to keep our hands clean so we don't spread germs. No one had an idea of germ theory. That was... Right. Well, it wasn't even that long ago,

but they were like, it's not proven that you can really infect someone through given birth. So they're like, so why are wasting time? but the midwives were like, this is something we do. I think that's something very brilliant. Like, it also, like the pork thing, like, I've heard a lot of theories about this. Like, perk pork gets you sick easier.

But you know what it really is? Really crazy? It's thermodynamics. Pigs eat the same stuff we eat. They have very similar digestive tracts. So if cows can eat grass, you know, 10 calories of grass becomes a calorie of cow, but you can't eat grass, so you might as well eat the cow. But what do you eat?

eat grain and oats. And you can eat the grain and you can eat the oats. So why are you wasting nine calories? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There's that too. And then there's, um, uh, because pigs, well, what is it? There's certain types of parasites that live in pigs that don't, aren't as common in other types of animals. So you could get to get sick from undercooked pork. So that, been, that's the commonly understood side of it. That's what most people think. The calorie. That's fascinating. I think calories is because Jews, they were hurting people, but they didn't herd pigs.

So there's rules about which animals they herded and didn't. And the ones that they heard it were the ones that ate the ground. And the ones that they didn't were the things that ate the berries and the roots that they could eat. Yeah. No, that's genius too. And then that's why I'm very hesitant to. This is my theory, by the way. So like the thermodynamics of pigs theory is the, the calum paper.

a lot of sense. No, I certainly do. And I think also this is where I have a great hesitation with, uh, now I used to be a lot more anarchic. And as much as I am, you know, a libertarian and very much prefer an anarchy model. It's not chaos. Not exactly. It's not, it's just a lack of rigid hierarchies of a specific kind that we have right now. Right. Lestrianism versus libertinism, right? The libertines say, yes, I don't tell me what to do. And the libertarians say, I won't tell you what to do. Yeah. We need social conventions.

We just don't need force. Well, I think a lot of these things, you know, just go on this tangent, too, I think a lot of these things resolve themselves because I will say, I will fight to the death for your right to be a heroin addict. And I'm going to tell you that's a really bad idea. And when if you choose not to listen to me, you're going to suffer the consequences and it's not my problem. I'm not going to save you.

I tried to save you when I gave you the advice. You didn't want it. It's on you. But you have to have both. You have to say you have to completely free of them. There are also some people that are saying, listen, you're an idiot, you got addicted to heroin, come to the rehab facility, we're going to help you here. Sure.

Like, yeah. There were checkpoints. Like, eventually, like, okay, like, you need someone to say, don't sleep in front of my storefront, you heroin addict. And you need someone to say, come in here, it's warm, just don't bring the heroin. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, the way I was going to that with the dichotomy was, um, yeah, I'm sorry.

No, no, it's okay. To interrupt any time. Actually, it's about you. I talk every week, like I said. It's all about me. It really is. Twitter, blue. I just ramble until you have something interesting to say in response.

But the dichotomy is absolute freedom requires absolute responsibility for yourself. So self-freedom is self-responsibility. The degree to which those are out of balance is where we start getting into problems. So there's, I think with the powers of the be, the matrix, whatever people, want to call it. I don't if you caught that argument in Laser addicts chat the other day. But I think the problem is there's a bit of a paradigm that says you can do whatever you want and everyone else is responsible for it. That can't work. But the flip side of it, and that's kind of the, I would say broadly the left communist socialist model of things is like everyone is

absolute complete freedom and everyone else has to be responsible to fix whatever goes wrong with all that absolute freedom. The reverse of that is the, I would say the fascist side of things, which is no one has any freedom because everyone is responsible for everyone else. And that's a different kind of type of rigid structure. The libertarian side, say, right libertarian going quadrant style, would be more like, I care enough to tell you not to mess up your own life, but I'm also not going to fix it unless I feel like it and I have time, voluntary style. Maybe I will. then the left libertarian is a little more feeling that social responsibility to care for others voluntarily.

But it's all libertarian side is voluntarily. It's like definitely not libertine. Like there are there are things that are bad for you. Now you can do that. I won't stop you. That's your absolute right to do all kinds of, but you can be you can eat too much candy. You can, you know, shoot heroin. You can drive fast and, you know, in safe ways away from densely populated areas.

Not my problem. Also, it's not my problem. I don't have any right to stop you because I have. have no responsibility to fix it. That's kind of where I'm coming down to. It's like, not that I wouldn't care. I would, there is a little thing in the, a lot of libertarian, like, what you're discussing is like the moral philosophy of libertarianism, which is like very, it's very care-based,

uh, very, like, not even like liberty, like care-based almost because it's, it's like, nobody's forcing each other. Yeah. There's also just people that are politically libertarian and hate the government, but don't have, like, the libertines. And they have this, like, why shouldn't I be able to shoot my, shoot my gun in, in a, densely populated city. Why should that be illegal? It's like, okay, but the act you're taking is a

forceful act. You're shooting your gun. That, like, reckless endangerment is forceful. I mean, like, you can, like, I'm in favor of duels in the woods, like two people getting guns shooting each other. Sure. Reasonable expectation of no harm. In a crowded inner city,

that's, like, reasonable expectation of you're doing as something as harmful. Yeah. A lot of libertines are like, well, come on, man. Like, just because this action has very foreseeable side effects of causing harm to somebody else, why should it be illegal? Yeah. And I think that that's the worst mentality among libertarians. Very much, there is a stripe of that, too.

And there's a difference between laws and social norms and enforcement. I mean, there's law enforcement and social enforcement. So we might say, you know, why don't we just make something illegal if we want to stop it? I'm like, well, because that has its own kind of consequences. You need a power structure in place that can become correct. with the social enforcement it's more like we all agree on certain things if there's someone someone brought this argument to me uh you know well shouldn't someone be morally obligated to save a drowning child if they can had no harm to themselves i'm like yeah i think that's a pretty shitty

thing to do not to save the child i would choose to save the child i would also choose to maybe ostracize someone known as the guy that let the child drown why he was watching for fun i mean god but an asshole then again i wouldn't use any kind of force force to make it illegal to fail to save the child. Even if I think it's the wrong thing to do and bad, there's that line between, okay, what's the right way to punish that kind of behavior? And I think, you know,

99% of the people in a given town would go, we don't want that guy living here because if my child's drowning, he's not going to save him. Get the fuck out. Austricism. You can't buy here. You can't rent here. You're not welcome.

Get out. And then that's like the ultimate is like, hopefully he learns his lesson. is like, man, better save the child next time. You know, that go, go ahead, though. I was going to say, there's also a distinction between seeing it and walking away versus watching it. Watching it is almost like a degradation thing. It's like, okay, that's gross, that you're your, you're.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I almost view it as a morally neutral to not save the child. But I do think we should be, we should have so much encouragement for people to do the right thing, that not doing the right thing in a time where it's clear to do the right thing. it's easy. If it's easy to do the right thing and you don't do it, that's an issue. Yeah, yeah.

And that's why I favor social stigma. I think it's a big thing. If it's hard to do the right thing, like... You should be publicly known as a pretty shitty person and people should look at you with disgust if you do things like that. Absolutely.

And that's a tremendously powerful enforcement. Saving a school bus from falling off a cliff, cliff is hard. So, like, not doing it isn't bad, but saving a child from falling out of a cliff is easy. Like, you know, grab, pull it up, and if you don't do that, that's shit.

So doing the right thing when it's easy, should be socially manned. Yeah, and there's validity to the question, too. It's like this is a great thought experiment. You know, should someone do that? And it's a tough thing, too, because it's like, we get to shoulds and shouldn't and there's that moral line of things. But I look at morality is very narrow.

And the only, so if I'm going to say something is absolute, there better be a damn good reason for it. So I think of the natural rights. non-aggression principle, that's the very narrow stripe of morality that I've been able to verify to the point where I can say, I believe this is absolutely true. Everything else, which might be 98, 95% of the rest of the problems we have to solve are a matter of aesthetics. Well, how do you feel about it? What do you want? What do you think? Did you read the much? Did you, did you read the righteous mind? Not yet. It's kind of on the list, but yeah. Okay. Well, can I ask you a question? Sure.

is it immoral for a family's dog is dies in the driveway of natural causes is it immoral for them to cook it up and eat it for dinner in my estimation no no it's not immoral no there's actually there's no moral valence to that personal feeling of disgust

is oh katana very nice I don't know that fell right over on me yeah so that's that's where I get to it's um you know I I would say I might not be I would choose not to do it personally I you know to my my little my little peanut butter dyes we're not we're not making you know peanut flambay um and I don't think I would be I would kind of look at my neighbors like

I guess that's a thing but I yeah man I don't really like that so personally aesthetically I'm feeling like that's I don't like that but do I is it morally wrong an absolute sense that I could say, I would take action to stop it physically. Like, if I see someone literally about to kill a child with a knife, I would shoot them to stop them. I would deploy lethal force. Absolutely, because that is a moral line. But the cook and the dog thing, I'm like, I can't say I would, it would be warranted or permissible or morally acceptable to use force to stop that. So that's where I look at that.

I have a very narrow definition of morality in that sense. Is your idea is like only if you like, if you wouldn't use force to stop something, it's by definition, not immoral? Yeah. There's the only obligation which exists to take action is when it is a moral absolute situation. And I think most of what we argue about is aesthetics. It's like, well, I don't like that. But you think that everything that's a moral absolute is reasonable to take action against? I think so.

Yeah. I would say that's kind of a hard line. Yeah, go ahead. I've got one. Okay. So you, someone swears an undying oath to their wife, to not cheat on them for the rest of their lives. And then they cheat on them.

Do you think the wife is right for killing the husband? No, not death. Leaving, yes. And possibly having a community decision that he, he has to leave that he was in the wrong and she gets to stay in the house and he needs to get the fuck out and we don't want him here anymore he's he's broken this promise that's along the lines of fraud um but do you do you see that as as morally absolutely wrong do you think adultery is absolutely wrong i believe so the the nEP is forced fraud and coercion so forces one or so this

is fraud in a way you have gave given a false promise so there is an absolute morality to it and action can justifiably be taken in the sense that if he refuses to, if she doesn't want him there, she's not going to forgive him. She did nothing wrong. She doesn't have to leave the house. The community can then walk over there personally and say, John, you're leaving.

And we're going to remove you from the home ourselves. If you won't go, we're going to take your furniture and your stuff with you and you can just go live somewhere else. She doesn't want you here. This is your fault. You screwed up. So I would say forces justified in that sense,

but not killing. I mean, it's not self-level. defense. That's kind of self-defense is the line for actual death. But force can come in many, many, many forms. And one of them can just be, yeah, yeah. If you're not going to walk, we're going to help you out, you know, like a bouncer at a club, that kind of thing. So, and in one more, sure, uh, so we talked with a pet. Uh, let's say somebody's, uh, mom dies overnight and, you know, natural causes, but for dinner, the family decides,

we've got all this meat. Let's cook her up and eat her. Is that morally absolutely wrong? I don't think so. I think that is also, I think that is also an aesthetic choice in a way. You know, the person isn't there anymore. You don't believe in any sort of absolute wrongness when it comes to sanctity.

Well, I do believe there are sacred things, but they're more conceptual, like the innocence of children is sacred. Or like the no cannibalism is sacred. Yeah. Eating human flesh is a degradation of the sanctity of human flesh. I don't think it is. So I don't draw that particular line

in a moral sense. It breaks down in some ways to the idea that let's say the mother wrote in her will, it is our family tradition that we consume the flesh of our deceased and I, this is my wishes and they have my permission.

This is a normal family. Normal family never done cannibalism. No can't and just the mother croaks. There's no laws against what you have to do with the dead body in this area, let's say. So they're like mothers croaked we have like a normal like burial normal family tradition whatever maybe they're catholics maybe they're atheists and they're just like well let's do this right like mom wasn't expecting it yeah mom had no idea mom died thinking she was probably going to get a burial but no will

yeah no no explicit instructions we might default to i see it in two different directions it's an interesting question that probably needs to be reasoned out and argued on both sides but the default expectation might be that she does not wish that to happen because she had no reason to believe it would. So we might default to that. The other side of it is, is it harming anyone? Is it causing demonstrable harm in any literal physical sense? Holy safe. Yeah, that's the other side of it. And if it's not, some people might think it's icky. And that's fair enough. But I don't, I don't know if we can say it's necessarily immoral. I don't think there is a

sacredness valence in a space or dimension to the body itself once the person is gone. That's kind of how I would break it down in my mind. But go ahead. I was like I totally disagree with that. I mean, I'm not

religious or anything, but I think yet I dislike force only morality arguments. Gotcha. I think force only morality arguments, like, they leave out, like,

clearly human societies throughout all the time have had non-force-related issues of morality, and I think some of them are, are, like, what's bad, okay, you might say that's bad,

but not evil. But I think there's certainly things that are evil that aren't forceful. Like, if someone, like, if you're, like,

we have something called the, the, like, the, what do you call it? The, the, like, exclusivity talk nowadays.

Like people date around for a bit and then exclusive. But if you never have that talk, but you date for 10 years and you live together and then you cheat. Yeah. Is it cheating because you never had the talk? What's the expectation there? Is that I think that that's like degradating to like a partner in relationship. Yeah.

Yeah. I would say that's tough too because you would want. There's the ideal. The ideal is perfect communication. Never going to happen. We're never going to reach it. But we lean towards it. We reach for it.

So there is in some ways, well, okay, are we boyfriend and girlfriend now? And that usually is the talk of, okay, we're exclusive or we're not. Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? Are we going to live together? And explicitly, we are allowed to see other people. Are we going to get married and keep it open, you know, that kind of thing or not? And people that just never have the talk, is it like, but dated and dated exclusively up until the point one of them decided to do something with someone else.

Is it, is it, if there was never, is there something sacred about the relationship just on the merits of it being a relationship? That's, that is a very tough question because I think there's strong arguments for both sides. So the idea of normal expectations, like just again with the mother,

she didn't have any reason to believe she was going to be. Why do I, why would I need to say that? Who would do that? It's incomprehensible. So there may be, an element to that where it's like, of course you don't sleep with other people. We live together.

We've lived together for 10 years. Why would you not inherently understand this is a violation of trust? And then the other side of it is, can we expect people to be mind readers? Can we expect adherence to cultural tradition to be uniform enough that it goes without saying? I don't know that we can. It's almost unreasonable expect people to read your mind. well, this is what I expect. If you'll only she say it.

And the other side of it is some things are kind of obvious. And if they're not, do you, there's something wrong with you? Because this is obvious to everybody. So you said cultural tradition. Do you think in a culture where it's normal for men to sleep with married men who have children to sleep with prostitutes on the regular? Do you think that's moral because it's expected in the society? Not necessarily. I think there's a different dimension we're examining in between those two questions.

the one of them is mutual expectations of two partners and the other one is is more of a question of is a tradition inherently good or not just because it's always been done i i don't lean into that i don't lean into the idea the tradition is always good because it's a tradition the wife is fully expecting when they get married that your husband's still going to sleep with prostitutes yeah if that's understood if it's okay with her i would recommend against it for a lot of reasons But I don't think it's inherently immoral. I think it's more of a, that is not best practice. It's not that she's like, not that she doesn't have feelings about it.

Not that she's like, oh, yeah, it's just something he does. But that she expects it and thus doesn't say anything. That it is a cultural expectation that even it might bug her, but she doesn't say anything. So the husband assumes, since it's culturally expected, she's okay with it. Yeah, I mean, if she never says otherwise, and it's kind of, this is just what men do. He might have every reason to believe she is okay with it and that she's not bothered by it. I don't know. That's why the communication thing, it's like, well, if you never told me, how am I supposed to know? And that fair point, but also, I look at this also is like, there's a lot

of things which are not immoral, but they are certainly less than best practice. So for me, it's being fat. This is not best practice. I fit is ideal. Fit is superior. I am lesser because I'm not at a healthier weight. Tell me about it. That being said, well, that being said, is it immoral? Does the, does the existence of an ideal make it immoral to fail to struggle as hard as you can towards the ideal? Or are there different ideals which create a moral obligation, some that don't?

So I think in terms of, in terms of a marriage specifically, if there are known risks, like it might cause problems at home, like she might get jealous, even if she expects that she might feel horrible about it. Good point towards the best practice of not doing it. If he could bring home a disease on accident and then infect her, that's a betrayal of the partnership as well. You're not putting her needs first. You're not treating her like someone valuable in your life when she's committed to you.

How committed are you? There's all kinds of best practices that are not exactly immoral, but it's like in some ways, like if you're not taking to this seriously, if you're not taking these things into account, are you really doing everything you should? to respect. And I think that's where the sanctity is like, is this thing sacred enough? Is this partnership, this union, this marriage? Do you take it seriously enough?

Do you have enough respect for it that you're going to do everything you can to make it good? To make it worth it. Like, why are you doing this if you're not going to take it seriously? And taking it seriously is partly best practice. So I get the idea of where the sacred idea comes from. I also think of that as different from the conceptual sanctity of childhood, innocence. It's like it's good that humans have a period of time to learn other things before being introduced to the adult world. I'm, I don't know if you read up, you're familiar with the author

Pierce Anthony? I don't think so. Fair enough. He's a, he's a old sci-fi fantasy author, like literally old. He's like in his 90s or 100, but now still writing books. He wrote a series of fantasy novels called The Zanth novels. They take place in a, in a magical alternative Florida. basically, which is where he lives. Yeah, yeah. So in this book, he describes what is called the adult conspiracy. And it's like anytime there's something a little too risque for kids, it gets censored by magic that maintains the adult conspiracy.

And the kids are, aw, shucks, I want to know more now. I don't want to be held back. And they show a character who progresses through life. And he becomes an adult. He's like, I get it now. This is why we can't let kids in on these adult things too soon. It's not good for them. It doesn't help anybody.

It doesn't help society. Doesn't help the kids, certainly. In the book, does it, is it gradual? Is it like gradually throughout your, like, it's magic that lets kids learn about things at the perfect stage in their development? Or is it all at once? Is it like nothing and then suddenly something? I haven't read the books in a while, but it's not kind of like magic restraint.

it in a way magically, as in a spell is upon them. And it's like if, if it's, and it's a tongue and cheek very satirical, uh, parody-esque, puns, silly, silly, silly, not series of series of books. And so it's more of a tongue and cheek type of thing of, oh, kids are always struggling to to figure out the world and they get frustrated by adults saying, not yet, you're too young for that. And so it's poking fun at that idea. But, but also that once those same kids get to an older age, they, they're able to look back

and say, well, this made sense. I wasn't ready for that. And we look at that now psychologically and we say, kids can't handle. This is why my hard libertarian stance is children and animals cannot consent, period. This is not discussed. Yes, I will go to the mat on that.

I will use force. Never mind. I was going to say to me what the animals thing. To enforce that moral line. That's, yeah. So. I've always thought about animals. You don't dolphins rate people?

Yeah, I've heard that. I've always asked people, do you think the person should be arrested if they don't fight back hard enough? You know, that's a tough one too because, you know, if the animal is doing nothing wrong

because it is in their animal nature, it doesn't mean we have to tolerate it because animals like animals. Animals want to eat us sometimes. That doesn't mean it's okay. It's okay for us to say, I'd rather not be eaten. I'd rather not be raped.

If the animal initiates and the person just says whatever and doesn't fight back, I don't know that that's a moral wrong. how that's almost like let's say if we made that a human thing let's say a human woman chose not to fight back against a human rapist did she do anything wrong and it's almost like can we say the victim has an obligation but it makes it an interesting question where the animal doesn't know any better but the human does so is this a different situation is the human

obligated to fight um is the human obligated to fight to the degree that they might do the animal some harm even though the animal isn't doesn't know any better. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know either. Yeah, it's a good one. We draw out like, like,

the thing, like 18 is the age of consent here. So an 18 year old and a 90 year old can have a relationship. It's true. But some states don't have Romeo and Juliet laws, which means it's technically illegal for an 18 year old of a 17 year old to have a relationship. Or two. Even though we, we.

We recognize that 18 year old, 17 year old is a much more appropriate age gap than 18 year old 90. It is. Like, like, we recognize that, but the law is like, we have to draw a line somewhere and that line happens to be there. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's always bugged me, too, the idea that it is arbitrary. And why not 17 years and 364 days? And I always felt like it bugged because it seemed arbitrary. You know, why not 16? Well, Romeo and Juliet laws are good like that, like, in the sense that 18 year old is, like, every 18, year old were like this, but, but it's, you know, if an 18 year old, even if they weren't at minors at the same time meets a 17 year old, 16 year old, we recognize, okay, they're,

this is relatively like, there's some gradients there. So, so there are laws that sort of take out like the hard line there that say, yeah, well, between these ages, between the ages of 16 and 20, that's a big development and like some gradient in between those ages. Yeah, maybe three years is okay, but like four is too much. Yeah, yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge deal. 16 to 20 a bit much, but 16 and 19 is like... And that's open for debate, too.

But where I was going with that is it always bugged me for the longest time. It's like the arbitrariness of it felt what am I trying to say? And this is again, the adult conspiracy side of things like my opinions change. But so I'm going back into the past here. The arbitrariness felt wrong. It's like how do we even make a decision when it is arbitrary? If we can't, this is not founded on anything, we picked the damn number. And we just said, that's it.

Like, we'll show your work. Where's the fucking reasoning? Why this number? Why not a different one? And then I explored it a little bit more. And I actually came around to saying, well, there's, my resolution of that problem was there has to be a line. And we have to pick somewhere to put the line.

And this seems to be like you're after puberty, you're old enough to, you know, you're old enough that holding you back more from adult responsibility might actually be harmful, just as much as introducing you to it too soon. So for whatever reason, this. feels like now maybe this is cultural again like maybe in another culture where you are a man at 14 and you are expected to know your shit and have your shit together and take care of yourself and contribute to your family etc etc and even get married maybe that would be in more appropriate age I don't think so because puberty I think any culture that I think we got to get through puberty first but

but what I'm saying is is under those expectations they might have a different view of it because of how they conceptualize when adulthood begins but I think you know we have If you pick a line, hey, it could be 17, could be 19. I think 21's too late. I think maybe 16's too early. So 18 feels right. But that may be because I grew up. 16 to 21 is our cultural years.

And we go, okay, that's sort of like 21, like puberty starts at 13, but starting puberty is clearly too early. So 16, mid to late puberty to 21, probably totally done almost. Yeah, like, like, depending on how that. So my resolution of that in my head, when my acceptance of it was, was the idea of, yeah, it is arbitrary and that's that cannot be helped it is there must be a line and on either side of it is is you know protection of parents and and responsibility for yourself and what i get frustrated with is the inconsistency of okay you can turn 18 but now in some places you can't drink a beer you can't

buy cigarettes you can't exercise your full rights as an adult even though now you have full responsibilities of adulthood imposed upon you signing contracts paying your own rent having a job I think there needs to be one line for everything. It is the age of majority. You are either above it or below it. You are a minor until you are a major, I guess. And once you are of the age of majority, it is carte blanche. You are an adult.

No one has the right to hold you back from anything that any other adult can enjoy. That's my, you know, to consistency. I almost have, like, I'm okay with the different ages for different things, but it always bothered me that voting, isn't last. Like, voting should be if you're an adult, like you can drive at 16, you can buy a gun at 18.

But like, if you drink at 21, vote at 21 too. Because if you can't drink, you can't vote. See, I might put that, I might put that all at 18, all of it,

drinking, voting, smoking, guns. Driving a car is a little bit different. I would actually abolish to the DMV, but that's me. So that would actually be off the table.

You can drive whenever you want when you can afford a car and maybe that's that sometimes that should be the milestone it's like when you are responsible enough to earn the money to buy a car now you're responsible enough to drive a car and take care of it and then we have situations where your parents help you buy a car which you know that that they did for me i didn't buy my own first car you know i'm part that also means i save money in a car to help you learn to drive it like if you don't have to help you drive it you might have to work and also they take responsibility for it because you are still a minor because you are under

their care and they're allowing this they're responsible so if they don't want you to have a card the damn will better not buy you one because they're paying for any damages so that's also and so if you leave it till 18 then it's like okay you can buy a car if you want to but you're responsible a hundred percent uh so anyway that's uh but that's all i mean how do we get here i think this is a fantastic tangent and i think it's related because what we're talking about is you assessing the morality of the abortion topic and all of this has been a fantastic exploration of what are the moral lines? And so you were asking me, that's why I didn't object and say, well, we should get back

to your thing. You're like, okay, well, what do you think about where moral lines are on these things? How do you conceive of morality? What, when is it appropriate to use force or draw? And with the abortion thing, I think that's very much related to the, you're an adult at 18. What? Why is it in the first three months, six months, whatever?

We don't have the same feeling of this is not okay. As soon as we get towards that tail end, we've very, very much feel that's a baby. That looks like what it would look like when it comes out and gets nursed and snuggled for the first time. But instead we're going to kill it. That's not okay. It's not okay with me personally. I don't like that either. I would, you know, to take a hard stance on the, on the abortion thing, I would say, ninth month abortions, absolutely murder. Not okay. Hard stance. Yeah, but. Not eight and a half months. Nine months is a bit much. Well, that is, that is an absolute. I'm like at that point, this does not need it. Well, well,

And as Tim Poole said, I mean, again, I never get into politics on the show. But these are, we're assessing morality. And specifically this, this morality question for you. He said, if you don't have to kill the baby, why would you kill the baby? You know? And if it can be removed safely, then you do so. Then we just don't kill it. And, and that's, that would be kind of my line, too, is like, libertarian style.

I believe every human person has. the absolute right of eviction. That's how I would describe it. They can, they don't have to kill the fetus, but they can have it removed. And if it dies because it doesn't have an umbilical cord to feed off anymore, not the fault of the evictor, but also not murder in that sense. And then people argue with me on that, but that's how much, how do we balance? Go ahead.

That's, I mean, that's basically my, my legal idea is, is, we're talking about abortion. we're talking about me struggling with the morality of abortion. A legal idea is a woman who's pregnant can take the baby out at any time, but only by, A, a medically professional, like a medical professional, and B, the medical professional, if in their power, must preserve the life of the baby. So one month abortion, a regular abortion. Eight and a half month abortion, that's a C-section. Yep, yep, absolutely.

Or an induced abortion. if it's an induced birth. If there's a way to do that. Exactly. But I differ from you and you say it's not immoral to take it. I think that it's my belief that when you consent to sex, you consent to baby. That is very much my belief. And if unless you are graped, then you consent it to baby.

Now, you can, you know, there's other, but, but that doesn't necessarily make the legal argument, because the legal argument is, could there be a government committee determining whether or not this was a consensual baby or not? Yeah. And the libertarian argument is, no, of course not. Yeah. If you want to do due process, you do it after the crime has been committed, not minority report style beforehand. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that. Definitely too. And I would, I mean, all of this is, it gets so, so, okay, so, honing back in a little bit on your.

dream and situation. So I think we've kind of teased out the meaning in a sense that this is the idea you were looking at how it would feel to you to embody this unrestricted abortion thing in life. After you had this dream, did any of your, did you come to a decision? Did you have an experience of having a settled mind a little bit more on the issue? This was, you know, funny, this was shortly after the Lance thing, I think. it might have been so Lance on Tim Poole you know what

yeah yeah and they talk about abortion about and this is the solution that I've sort of had in my head but there's such there's so much like so whenever I hear something like that complex I think about it a lot and I kind of settle back in the middle here where I am

but it's the morality of it is different than the legality of it and that's always difficult like if I think this thing is evil evil but I'm saying you can do it legally, it's rough. Yeah.

That's where I look down. I have the same conundrum, too, which is wrong is wrong. If it's wrong at one point, it's wrong at any point up to that because it's all the same thing. So if a category is consistent, the response to the category must be consistent

at all points of the category. Now, you might say moving the line, remove something from a category. I don't think that's the case here. I used to think, well, it's not really human life. And then I said, you know what? It kind of is. And I have to struggle with that fact. I can't lie to myself conveniently to say, well, I just exclude that from the category for reasons. Like, can I really do that? I don't think I can. So that's why I'm like, okay, under what conditions,

would it be acceptable that this happened? What, how do we balance the right of the mother and the right of the child at the same? So if these are two human beings. And I came down to that, that dividing line of the right of eviction, which I don't even think I, you know, came up with that. I heard the term, but it was kind of where I was going in my head where it's like, can, would it be right to say have the government force you to house a homeless person because they have no place to live and might die if you don't? That is making, using force to make you responsible for someone else against your wishes. You know, it's literally third, third, you know, abortion actually might be legal in the United States under the third amendment.

Is that, is that, is that, homeless person, your five-year-old child. No, no, there are differences. No, there are differences. But if you look at it from the government can't force you to house someone, quarter soldiers in a time of war or whatever, that third. What a great. I'd love that argument.

The Third Amendment argument. It might actually be legal under the Third Amendment. Yeah, I might. Yeah, and I don't know if I thought of that or if I heard it from someone else when I'm like, that makes a lot of sense. So that's where I come down to the right of eviction. It's like, I think bodily autonomy is absolute. in terms of no one can force you to use your body for the sake of another person against your

wishes. I think that's absolutely immoral off the table, not acceptable. So how do we implement that or apply that principle to the pregnancy questions? Like if, and as you said, if you're responsible consent to sexes, consent to pregnancy, if you are ultimately responsible for the condition of the person, yeah, you got to see it through. You really can't get, sorry, you're stuck. damn that that's terrible I wish wish that wasn't happening to you since you don't like it but you can't really kill someone because it's inconvenient that's that's one perspective the other side of it is uh yeah I invited them in but now I decided they can't stay I've changed my mind it is now against my wishes and they must be removed but not killed like I can't take someone uh the homeless guy in my

house I invited him in and I'm like this isn't working really don't want you here change my mind I can't just shoot him in the head and throw his body out back I got to help him leave in one piece. But you can throw him out to the blizzard, though. You can't throw him out to the blizzard. If you know he's going to die, it's unfortunate, but he should have followed your rules, I guess. Yeah, and that's a tough thing.

It's like we want people to be compassionate, but also that is a personal line of like, I am not willing to sacrifice more than X. Now this situation demands X plus one. That is too far for me. Do I have a right to tell someone? No, X plus one is not too far for you. You have to do this.

Maybe we do. Maybe we do. It's a tough one. That's why I, I very often lean towards, let's try and make this not a problem. Let's try and make the number of abortions that occur zero by other means. Partly because it is an...

Social enforcement. Social enforcement, but also technological advancement would be nice. Still, it would be nice if people were not sexually incontinent. Dogs, what do they say? Dogs,

if they can't eat it or fuck it, they piss on it. We are better than that. I think humans should behave better than dogs because we are. And there's nothing wrong with dogs doing that, but we are not dogs. Dogs are dogs, humans are humans.

And we have the capacity for keeping our word and sexual countenance and best practice analysis. So, I mean, long story short on this. And we've gone long. This is how episodes get up to three and a half four hours. It just happens. Yeah,

as long as you got the time, I'm fine with it. It's not been a waste of my time. But I think we've at least teased out the, the purpose of that dream of, like, really having a hard look at this issue and where your personal comfort level is. and how horrified you were at the very end that you became this person.

You saw yourself embody an idea as a thought experiment. And you're like, I'm actually not comfortable if that was actually me. I'm not comfortable taking that idea and making it my own and living it in the world. So that kind of helps you, whether it's, whether it provided you the ultimate answer that, that's it. I've divine revelation or not. Or it just got you to a point where you're like, I know I'm not going to embrace that perspective fully because that's not me that's that's that's somebody else that I choose not to become um if that makes sense that's kind of the idea of this dream or yeah I think that's absolutely

right I think I think uh sort of uh metaphorical half metaphorical because half it was pretty literal but but interpretation of your stance on my stance on abortion legality being the dream the purpose of the dream yeah and sometimes we just show ourselves these thought experiments to say, let me, let me look at the whole picture as a means to better understanding what I think about the situation itself. Sometimes we don't get an answer. We get a clearer understanding of the picture. And they might still leave us with questions, but I'd say that's almost necessarily the first step to understanding anything. Let me see, let me start with observation. What the hell is actually happening here? What is this thing I'm looking at? Now I can

decide, well, what do I feel about it? What do I want to do with it? Excuse me. Yep. So, yeah. Now, you mentioned initially way back when. It's like, this one was like, you have no idea what the hell it means. Oh, the dream I had last night? What was last night or this, this one?

This one you had a... Oh, oh. This one I thought was... More interesting. Yeah, this one I thought there would be more substance. because the other one was like sort of fluffy. Okay, gotcha. And some of those are very interesting as well.

I mean, I've had people, I once filmed, at least, well, filmed, recorded, at least an hour-long episode with the gal who's the entire dream was the sensation of falling through a void. Really? That when we talked about it. I've had that dream before. Yeah, yeah. And it might mean, it might have very similar meanings between people. Free fall. Free fall.

Was it free fall or was she accelerated? It was not, ah, I have to go back and watch the episode. I think it was a very gentle descent. And it was, it wasn't in like a cosmic void where you could see a field of stars. Absolute blackness. No sensation of wind. Nothing. There was nothing tactile.

The only orienting phenomenon was the sensation itself of falling. She was just in a void and the feeling of falling. And it wasn't like a plummet. Wasn't a chaotic issue. Was it a scary dream? Or was this just like? falling. And she said she wasn't scared, I believe. I have to go back and listen to it. Yeah, yeah. I would have horrified. To me, anything that happens to a dream is scary. So if I'm

falling down, I'd be like, what the hell is happening? How do I get out of here? And, you know, anyone out there, feel free to go back and double check. But I think what we got around to. Yeah, you went out there calling to Benjamin, email Benjamin. If you have a falling to a voyage dream, he'll get you a nice. Well, I mean, go back and watch the episodes. I'm probably not going to do it. And tell me if I'm wrong, I'm mischaracterizing this. But I think we got around to the idea that because it wasn't terrifying or scary, there was an acceptance to it. It was a, in a sense, it was the free fall idea of, um, a willing and, and, um, necessary a participatory surrender to circumstances. Like, I, it's the letting go of a need

to control something because things are going to work out just fine. I may be retconning this a bit in my mind, describing it differently, but that's my recollection of it, uh, is, and that's very unique to that person. So you brought me that dream and you said, I was falling through a void exact same circumstances, but I was terrified. There would probably also be something to do with feeling your life was out of control. There's broad strokes. But then we get into why and we go from there on your personal level. Anyway, long story short on that. So, well, if we, if you believe I've given you at least a, you know, a fun conversation and a decent understanding of the dream. very nice

yeah i mean pretty much pretty much where we i mean i don't think it was that crazy deep like some nonsense dreams are where you're like driving a car but suddenly there's no pedals or whatever and there's no wheel and you're out of control yeah yeah like that but but uh it's it's certainly a very uh

i don't know it's it's weird to talk about dreams for a long because usually in the real world you're like i had a scary dream but nobody gives a shit yeah yeah no true And there's there's a whole history of I mean going back 2000 years. I think there was advice in the Greek and Roman times or whatever that said don't bother other people with your dreams. They don't care. They don't want to hear about that. Now, that may have been that guy's perspective on it.

Is that Marcus Aurelius? I don't remember who said it or why. Meditation was like, yeah. Might be. I mean, I have meditations right there. That's a good book. No, it certainly is. And actually, if anyone out there, shout out to a cure.

of the Don, he has a meditation's meaning wave. So you can listen to kind of a lo-fi hip-hop version of these things he's put together. He quotes Jordan Peterson, Alan Watts, dozens of, you know, Joe Rogan, Jock Willink. He's made a ton of these famous for it now. It takes, takes very deep, important philosophical themes, puts them in music. You can listen to it and enjoy, and it has looped and synchronized and edited versions of the people themselves, commentary saying the phrases in their own words and you know and so he made he makes a song out of it brilliant stuff like here the dawn meaning wave always shut that guy out on on twitter and whatnot um okay well i was going to say if we're if you think we reached a good point of

understanding that we just wrap we do i never know how to end these things i'm legit autistic i'm like if we talked long enough i have no idea but um you know by yeah by way of uh of exiting the uh the the program here i'll say uh once again thank you to our guest see paffy youtube creator dungeon master and self-declared once and future king of southern new hampshire uh link in the description below and for my part would you kindly like to your subscribe to tell your friends always need more volunteer dreamers viewers for the game streams uh 16 currently available works of historical dream literature the most recent dreams and their meanings by horace g hutchinson all this and more at benjamin the dream wizard dot locals dot com and there's nothing else to do but once again see paffy thank you for being here. What is locals? Locals is a, it's the social media site attached to Rumble.

So it's just a place where you can have your own page and you can post to it. And people can join and be members. And that's where I'd prefer to receive donations. They actually have a better ratio of you get to keep more of the money donated than other Yeah, I've never heard of that before. Yeah. Benjamin the Dream Wizard.

Dot locals.com. There we go. So thanks for being here. and appreciate the talk and everybody out there. Thanks for listening.